Piero di Cosimo's Magdalene, a lady in the guise of a saint

When she first reveals herself to the visitor to Palazzo Barberini, Piero di Cosimo’s Magdalene appears as an image so startling, so unexpected, so modern that she does not even look like a work of the 15th century. And she is so real and alive that we can think of anything but a saint, so much so that critics have often described her as a gentlewoman in the guise of St. Mary Magdalene, thinking of some lady of the Florence of the time who had Piero portray her in the guise of the penitent saint, perhaps because she bore his name. It is a hypothesis that still stands, although in Hawaii, at the Honolulu Museum of Art, there is a St. John, another product of Piero’s hand, which would seem almost a pendant of the Magdalene, despite its inferior quality, and which has led to the idea of a cycle of evangelical characters, all painted in the same format: half-length images silhouetted against a somber background, framed by a mock frame.

What is certain is that the Magdalene was intended for private devotion. And the cultural context that inspired this image in Piero di Cosimo is also certain: this extravagant painter, this “spirito molto vario et astratto” as Vasari had called him, was well aware of Flemish-style devotional images, which involved the use of saints dressed in contemporary garb and described with vivid realism. His Magdalene has been likened to that which appears in Rogier van der Weyden’s Braque triptych, also clad in fifteenth-century costumes (although the attitude of Piero’s Magdalene appears more similar to that of the Magdalene reading today in the National Gallery in London, and for the pose one could also call into question Martin Schongauer’s Madonna and Child and a Parrot ), and to the many Magdalenes that appear in Jan Gossaert’s production, some of them, though slightly later, on a dark background like Piero di Cosimo’s. The frame, on the other hand, recalls Hans Memling’s models, above all the chalice that appears on the verso of the Bembo diptych, and which in all likelihood Piero must have been familiar with.

The extraordinariness of Piero di Cosimo’s image lies precisely in the wisdom with which the artist was able to filter his models and reinterpret them according to his own taste, according to his culture as a whimsical and elegant Florentine artist, who had trained with Cosimo Rosselli when in the city there were figures like Botticelli, like Verrocchio, like Ghirlandaio, all artists of the generation preceding his own, at the height of their careers. Piero di Cosimo was an unusual Florentine, however: his natural curiosity had led him to grasp, a case not so frequent among Tuscan painters, the cues coming from northern Europe, evident here not only in theassimilation of sources but also in the very fine and meticulous execution, and also to be among the first to approach the innovations of Leonardo da Vinci, the delicacy of his sfumato, his soft profiles, his way of illuminating faces, with gradual, light chiaroscuro and diffuse light: think of La Belle Ferroniè;re, for example.

These are the suggestions that Piero di Cosimo elaborates to arrive at this Magdalene of seductive beauty, which ranks among the pinnacles of his production. His Magdalene fascinates precisely because she does not look like a saint: she is a late fifteenth-century Florentine woman, beautiful, with a noble, sharp face, her eyebrows shaved as was the fashion of the time, her blond hair parted by a parting, gathered in braids behind the nape of her neck, and falling back in messy locks on her chest, because in any case it was necessary to define her as a saint Mary Magdalene, and loose hair was a necessary iconographic attribute. So are the book the young woman is reading, and the small balsam bowl resting on the parapet. The pearls that adorn the hair, however, are alien to the iconography of Magdalene, just as completely foreign to canonical depictions of the saint is the colorful fashionable dress (those robes with “a vast guilloche of red, green and the yellow of a dry autumn leaf” mentioned by Aldo de Rinaldis in the 1930s National Gallery of Ancient Art catalog), even softened by a pink bow above the left sleeve.

It is an image full of life: we look at Piero di Cosimo’s Magdalene, and we see the mundane image of a woman reading in a house we imagine tidy and elegant, we enter her intimacy, we c’we wonder about the contents of the card resting on the windowsill, and then without finding an answer we return to linger on the austere grace of her face, on her delicate, tapering hands, on that concentrated expression that Piero di Cosimo investigates with vivid acuity, on that impenetrable countenance that makes her an image even more bewitching than Raphael’s Fornarina, displayed beside her. She inspires us with thoughts that are anything but mystical and spiritual, Piero di Cosimo’s Magdalene.

Andrea De Marchi, for that matter, has written that here we see “a representation of the subject that is not infected by the sexuallyphobic atmosphere that had been breathed in Florence under the influence of Savonarola,” an image that does not show “reflections of other such tensions, which would shortly lead to the Protestant Reformation,” and which on the contrary “is configured as a model of mature Humanism, not yet challenged by those epochal passages.” This aspect, too, could push toward an early dating, in the early 1590s, as Federico Zeri had proposed, seeing in the face of Piero di Cosimo’s Magdalene a woman reminiscent of Filippino Lippi’s types. Others, however, have advanced a later dating, in the early sixteenth century: Mina Bacci, for example, noted how the “slight flow of light on the face” recalled the kneeling saints of the Incarnation of Jesus preserved in the Uffizi, similar to the Magdalene of Palazzo Barberini also in their physiognomies. And again Mina Bacci, to bring evidence in support of her hypothesis, asked for a comparison of Magdalene with the so-called Simonetta Vespucci of the Chantilly Museum, and for consideration of the “profound gap” between the sharp profile of that surely 15th-century image and the modern cut of the saint in the National Gallery of Ancient Art. A knot, that of dating, of difficult unraveling.

Just as difficult will it be to trace the circumstances under which Magdalene was painted, assuming it is still possible to do so. We can for now content ourselves with knowing how the work entered the Roman museum: it is a story within a story. The Magdalene had appeared in the early 1870s at the Monte di Pietà in Rome, where it had been eyeballed by Giovanni Morelli, the distinguished art historian who had developed one of the first attribution methods, based on the recognition of recurring details in an author’s paintings, the so-called “Morellian figures.” Morelli had recommended the purchase of the work to a friend and colleague of his in Parliament, Baron Giovanni Barracco, a passionate collector of sculpture who, however, evidently did not disdain good paintings, since he immediately took Morelli’s suggestion and secured the work for the modest sum of one thousand liras (that would be a little more than four thousand euros today). It was Morelli himself, on that occasion, who had recognized the hand of Piero di Cosimo in a work that had previously been assigned to Mantegna, and his attribution has not been disputed since. Later, in 1907, Barracco donated the Magdalene to the state. But it was one of the works he cherished most: in a letter sent to Morelli himself he wrote that the saint “lives and sleeps in my room, beside my bed, and at length we look at each other with love...with those braids and that face she resembles a beautiful niece of mine, who is only eighteen years old.” Further demonstrating the intensity of this masterpiece.

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