Few biblical stories are better known than that of Mary Magdalene. According to the Roman Catholic interpretation, Mary is the adulteress whom Christ forgives—thus becoming a cultural symbol of atonement.
One of Jesus’s closest followers, Mary played a role in several events narrated in the Gospels. She was also the first to discover Christ’s empty tomb after his resurrection. Legends of Mary’s seclusion developed centuries after her death: Stories said she spent her remaining days as a hermit in prayer and penance. These accounts provided inspiration for religious art—including Italian Renaissance painter Titian (circa 1490–1576).
Symbolism and Iconography
Lifting her teary-eyed gaze to heaven, Titian’s Mary embodies the iconography of the penitent prostitute: a woman with a dissolute past who reflects on sin, mortality, and enlightenment after being forgiven and exorcized of her demons by Christ.
The Renaissance painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) believed that stories of Mary’s late-life seclusion influenced the painting. One legend claimed that she concluded her life as a hermit—her clothes being first reduced to rags and then destroyed entirely while her hair grew long enough to serve as a substitute. If Vasari’s assessment was accurate, then Titian symbolically combined elements from Mary’s biblical and post-gospel life.
In most of Titian’s compositions, Mary is placed in Southern France’s Sainte-Baume grotto—where she’s recorded to have lived in seclusion for 30 years. To her left is a small ointment jar harkening back to Luke 7: 36–50, where she (regarded to be Mary Magdalene in Catholicism) came to the house of Simon the Pharisee to ask Jesus for forgiveness. Weeping repentant tears on Christ’s feet, she then dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume from an alabaster jar. In the painting, Titian placed his own signature on the jar.
Early Prototype
Titian’s first “Penitent Magdalene”—a prototype that differed significantly from his later compositions—was likely commissioned in the early 1530s’ by Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. The painting was a gift for the widowed Vittoria Colonna who had married into one of Rome’s most important noble families. Colonna was a poet at the center of High Renaissance literary circles and the religious reform movements of her day. She later became a close friend to Michelangelo.One of Titian’s earliest recovered paintings is housed at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Painted for Francesco Maria I delle Rovere, Duke of Urbino, this painting is believed to have followed the composition owned by Colonna.
Mary is still depicted as a young woman, naked from her resolve to strip herself of her sinful past. According to historians from the Uffizi gallery, Titian may have used a Venetian courtesan as his model. Because of its theme of a penitent sinner, the painting became an example of women who repented and converted.
The saint’s repentance was one of the few acceptable subjects for Renaissance artists to sacredly represent the female nude. Titian consciously mixed two concepts of feminine beauty in this painting: chastity and sensuality. The artist positioned Mary, holding her long hair over her exposed body, in a similar iconic position as Venus Pudica (modest Venus), who holds her right hand over her breast and her left hand over her groin.
Magdalene in the Grotto
After painting the first series of the “Penitent Magdalene,” Titian revisited this theme at least seven times from 1550 to 1570. Adding depth and dimension to the composition, Titian painted Mary in a wider, more sweeping landscape.
Professor Paul Joannides suggests that Titian experimented with a couple variants between the abandonment of the first prototype and the development of the second. One example is housed at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and may have remained in the artist’s studio as a template.
Still painted in the Pudica pose, Mary now wears a simple white dress with a red-and-white striped prayer shawl cloaked around her. Key differences between the transitional paintings and Titian’s later, developed compositions are the introduction of the skull and the changing of vessels from an alabaster jar to a glass pitcher. Nearly identical at first glance, Titian’s late paintings have minor differences when compared. Many from this prototype illustrate Mary using a rock as a table with a skull (a reminder of death) and a prayer book propped on top.
Opposite the first series of “Penitent Magdalene,” the later paintings are all diurnal scenes with the sky visible on the right. While this might be a coincidence, it raises the possibility that Titian intended the paintings to be chronological. If so, Colonna received the one before daybreak where Mary begins to repent—her sensuality symbolic of original sin and her ascension above it. The later paintings would then show the sun progressively rising as her conversion progressed.
