Mary Magdalene

Moretto da Brescia · 1540–50

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

166 × 47 cm (65 3/8 × 18 1/2 in.); Framed: 181 × 66.1 × 5.1 cm (71 1/4 × 26 × 2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Mary Magdalene by Moretto da Brescia is one of those quietly arresting images — a penitent saint caught in a moment of interior stillness, her gaze lowered, her presence soft but charged with feeling. Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Bonvicino) worked in the northern Italian city of Brescia during the sixteenth century, absorbing influences from both Venetian colorism and the more grounded naturalism of Lombard painting. His figures are never theatrical; they carry their devotion inward, rendered with a warm palette and a delicate handling of light that gives skin and fabric alike a gentle, luminous weight. In this depiction of the Magdalene, painted in the 1540s, that restraint is fully at work — the saint's expression combining repentance and quiet resolve in equal measure. Moretto was one of the few Italian painters of his generation to show a demonstrable interest in northern European portraiture conventions, a cross-channel sensibility that lends his figures an unusual psychological closeness rarely found in contemporary Italian religious work. A hand-painted oil reproduction captures the same warm tones and subtle gradations of light that define the original, preserving the quiet intimacy Moretto built into every layer of paint.