Repentant Mary Magdalene

In 1622, Guercino painted the main altar for the Roman monastery church of former prostitutes (Santa Maria Maddalena delle Convertite al Corso) in which he depicted Mary Magdalene, with important attributes of nudity and hair, accompanied by two angels. This opportunity arose after the general reconstruction supported by Cardinal Aldobrandini. Guercino joined two themes in the painting, the scantily clad penitent Mary Magdalene in the desert and Mary by the grave in the days after the crucifixion of Christ meditating on the symbolsof passions.

Guercino also depicted the Saint many times in paintings for private worship. Information about the lost original of the reduced half figure of the Saint meditating over the crown of thorns comes from one inventory of the Farnese family of 1680, according to which the aforementioned painting with the same name was located in their Parma seat (Palazzo del Giardino).

The described scene was at first identified in an already existing painting in Naples (Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte). Based on this knowledge they designated other related works in collections in Chambéry (Musée des Beaux-Arts) and Sarasota (John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art).

Judging from the numerous replicas, the scene became a very popular product of Guercino’s workshop. Several members of Gennari’s artistic family worked with it. Guercino was a cousin of Ercole Gennari, whose sons Cesare and Benedetto II ran the workshop after the master’s death.

If Cesare Gennari was the actual creator of the painting in Sarasota, he can be accepted as the creator of the painting in Bratislava, which is the most distant of all of the aforementioned replicas. However, thanks to its original expression, it can be considered as a template for the graphic work of M. Lämmel, which incorrectly indicates that the creator of the template is Domenichino; it also contains complementary information that the painting was from Trieste in 1865.

Zuzana Ludiková ● LUDIKOVÁ, Zuzana - BURAN, Dušan. Talianska maľba = Italian Painting. Bratislava : Slovenská národná galéria, 2013. 242 strán. ISBN 9788080591748.