See the Miniature Portrait of Mary Magdalene That Raphael Painted When He Was Only 20
Created around 1503, the painting—which just sold at auction for $3.1 million—depicts the saint after the crucifixion of Jesus, when she entered a period of repentance
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A tiny portrait of Mary Magdalene by Raphael has sold at auction for $3.1 million. The delicate oil painting measures less than 15 inches tall and about 5 inches wide.
Raphael painted the portrait of the saint around 1503, when he was about 20. Experts say that Saint Mary Magdalene showcases the Italian Renaissance master’s early talent.
“He was working with such technical refinement already at this point in his career,” Daria Foner, an art historian and the old masters specialist at Sotheby’s, tells Sarah Cascone of Artnet. “The work has an elegance, a type of grace and almost sweetness that we associate with Raphael.”
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Raphael’s Mary Magdalene is a willowy figure standing in front of a black geometric background. She’s without her signature jar of oil with which she anointed Jesus, and instead wears a shaggy shirt made of her own hair, a symbol of her rejection of material goods and repentance following the crucifixion.
Other famous depictions of the “Penitent Magdalene,” as Mary Magdalene at this phase of her life is sometimes called, show the saint crumbling inwards. Donatello’s sculpture Penitent Magdalene (circa 1453-55), for instance, has hollow eyes and a half-open mouth. In contrast, Raphael paints her in an almost angelic pose with a golden halo around her head.
“It’s unusual, and it’s a superb painting, a wonderful example of Raphael at this really early moment in his career,” Foner adds.
The painting hasn’t been on the market since 2000, when it sold at Christie’s for just $611,000. At that time, however, its subject was identified as Saint Mary of Egypt, as ANSA reports. Sotheby’s now identifies the subject as Mary Magdalene, though it acknowledges that the omission of the oil jar “leaves open the possibility that the figure may instead be Saint Mary of Egypt.”
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Saint Mary Magdalene was a side panel of an altarpiece used “for private devotion,” per the auction house. Experts don’t know who commissioned the altarpiece or who is depicted in the center panel, but they know that the other lateral panel was a miniature painting of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which is now housed in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy.
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To prepare for the portraits, Raphael first made full-scale spolveri drawings of his subjects. He then poked the main contours of the drawings with holes, placed the sketches on top of the canvas and covered them in a fine charcoal dust. This process left an outline of the two saints, which he used as a guide for painting. The sketch of Mary Magdalene is now housed at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, while the drawing of Catherine is in the Louvre’s collections.
The final paintings are double-sided. The verso sides are painted in a colorful pattern with a prayer running across both panels: “May the Virgin Mary bless / Us with her holy offspring.”
“You can actually see one of Raphael’s fingerprints on the verso,” Foner tells Artnet. “He was sort of mottling and mixing these pigments with his hands.”
At $3.1 million, Saint Mary Magdalene is a “potential bargain” compared to some of his other pieces, as Artnet writes. His most expensive painting, Portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino (1518), sold for $37.3 million in 2007. His most expensive work overall, a chalk sketch called Head of a Muse (1510-11), which he used as a guide for his Vatican fresco Parnassus, went for $48 million in 2009.
