Guido Cagnacci's Magdalene Taken to Heaven: the flesh and the spirit

We know a good part of the biographical story of Guido Cagnacci, the great Romagna artist, thanks to a nucleus of letters and documents collected in the mid-18th century by a Rimini painter, Giovanni Battista Costa, who called Cagnacci an “excellent painter” endowed with “marvelous talents,” whose reputation was nevertheless sullied by the tales that ran in “vulgar mouths.” And although the rumors about him had not prevented him from being called by Emperor Leopold I to the court of Vienna, where Guido died in 1663, his bad reputation probably determined his critical misfortune, until his complete rehabilitation in the twentieth century.

It was a single episode that affected Guido Cagnacci’s life and artistic career: in 1628, the artist had exchanged a promise of marriage with Countess Teodora Stivivi. The two lovers planned an elopement together to persuade her parents to agree to the marriage, but the plan was foiled by papal cops, who captured Teodora: while waiting to find horses to leave, Guido had taken her to the home of her father Matteo, who, however, reported her presence to the curia. The young woman was thus taken under arrest by the bishop’s bargello and segregated in a convent at the behest of her family. She would come out a couple of years later, on the condition that she marry a relative of equal status, which would save Theodora’s honor, but more importantly her substantial dowry and the income left to her by her late first husband. Guido tried for years to make his case in court, unsuccessfully and, indeed, getting disinherited by his father.

The echo of the scandal continued to follow the painter wherever he went: it alienated him from the sympathies of his patrons, brought him threats, and probably saddled him with a reputation as a corrupter of youth, which the artist was unable to shake off. It was true, however, that Guido Cagnacci had a certain familiarity with the female gender, as well as a boundless love for women: one would not otherwise explain those mulieval bodies so alive, throbbing, seductive, procubescent, quivering that populate his masterpieces. Cleopatre, Lucrezie, Magdalene, saints, heroines of mythology and history who offer themselves to the relative with those “turgid tits of a salumiera” and that “skin full of buttery health” of which Arbasino spoke in Fratelli d’Italia recalling the Death of Cleopatra in the Brera Art Gallery. This image of a gastronomic, earthy, extremely physical beauty could be extended to all the women in Guido Cagnacci’s masterpieces. Even when the woman is a saint ascending to the spheres of divinity, such as the Magdalene Taken to Heaven , which has always been among the Santarcangelo painter’s most praised paintings. He made two versions of it: the oldest is the one in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, in storage at Schleissheim Castle in Germany, while the most recent, and probably the most successful, is the one that can be seen in the Sala di Marte in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

Guido Cagnacci, Magdalene Taken to Heaven (c. 1640; oil on canvas, 162.5 x 122.8 cm; Munich, Alte Pinakothek, on deposit at Schleissheim Castle, inv. 542)

Guido Cagnacci, Magdalene Carried to Heaven (c. 1642-1645; oil on canvas, 192.5 x 138.5 cm; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, inv. 1912 no. 75)

Ancient and modern commentators all agree on the power of this image. It also applies to detractors, who in condemning Guido Cagnacci’s licenses paradoxically extolled the originality of his invention: in 1838, an academic of the Crusca, Giovanni Masselli, while recognizing Cagnacci’s merit for having painted the figures “with admirable impasto and with tints that very much resemble the real thing” and for having given “beautiful relief to the parts, with the very intense placement of a few lights on the most raised, and with no less judicious distribution of the half-tints and shadows,” condemned the “capricious liberties” of the Romagnolo painter, and in particular “that angel” which “will not be praised by anyone who loves in painting convenience and decorum.” Indeed, one of the artist’s boldest solutions unfolds in the Magdalene Taken to Heaven : the saint, completely nude and with only a thin veil wrapping her waist, with her tawny hair falling over her body but leaving her rosy nipples in evidence and enhancing the pearly tones of her skin, is led to heaven by an angel who supports her by holding her under her thighs, caught as he turns his gaze to her terga. The scene takes place in heaven, but there is little that is ethereal or spiritual: Cagnacci’s Magdalene is an ode to physicality, and it is one of the most carnal Magdalenes in art history. A tangle of bodies, an intertwining of flesh, a physical presence highlighted not only by the strength of the legs of the two protagonists, which occupy a good part of the lower register of the composition, but also by the blushing of the fingers and cheeks, by that face so real and natural, by the spontaneity of the gestures. There is nothing in the history of art that is even merely approachable to this admirable and astonishing invention by Cagnaccesca.

And it is not only his love for women that justifies this and other images: there is the centrality of the human body, common to all seventeenth-century art, which Cagnacci perceives according to his own sensibility as an “erotic painter,” as Antonio Paolucci has defined him. “Erotic” in the literal sense of the term, because like no other the Romagna artist felt the eros pulsating in the heart and blood of his subjects. Moreover, it is not uncommon to find, in the seventeenth century, daring women even in sacred paintings: think of Vouet’s Temptation of St. Francis in the Alaleoni Chapel of San Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome.

For sure, then, there is also the attunement with a patronage that did not disdain female nudes justified by the need to make the historical, sacred or religious subject truthful: and Guido Cagnacci was a formidable dissimulator. The Magdalene, in the Munich version, had been seen by Costa in the collection of the Bolognese senator Angelelli (who later gave it to the Elector Palatine: that is why it is now in Germany), and he had written that “Cagnacci, when for so many of his other riguardevoli works he was not celebrated, the would be solely for this one, such is the beauty of this painting in many kinds of perfection.” More recently, Daniele Benati, on the occasion of the major 2008 monographic exhibition on Cagnacci in Forlì, acknowledged that the artist had made “an enormous leap” over his earlier production in the period when he was painting Magdalene Taken to Heaven-a period when Cagnacci, the scholar wrote, was moving “toward solutions of extraordinary power and communicative force.” For his Magdalene, he had certainly looked to Simone Cantarini, the eccentric and quarrelsome painter from Pesaro who, with his St. James in Glory , had achieved an extraordinary fusion between the crystalline airs and classical measure of Guido Reni and the naturalism he derived from observing the painters of his homeland, the Marche. Also Reni-like is the chromatic score on which Guido Cagnacci sets his Magdalene, especially in the more lucid and brilliant German version. The Florentine version, on the other hand, is distinguished by those more intense weather effects, more pronounced chiaroscuro, and wanting even a more vivid naturalism: the work arrived in Florence in 1705 and, in a letter, the Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici praised it as “well preserved, of very fresh color and well drawn.” And Giuseppe Adani suggests to me that the underpainting, the suspended legs, the cloud-covered sky, have a Correggio matrix: a strength that the Romagnolo Cagnacci drew from the land where the Emilian Allegri was born, revisiting the innovations that Correggio delivered to the history of painting.

Benati had titled his essay “The Body and the Soul.” and today, we admire this Magdalene and count it among the highest products of seventeenth-century art not only because we feel close to that woman who is so alive, but also because perhaps no other painter of the time had been able to operate, in such lofty and at the same time so earthly terms, that fusion of body and soul that is one of the most felt philosophical and theological themes of the century. And that can all be felt in that saint so physically present and so eager to ascend to heaven.

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