Saint Mary Magdalene

This painting is an excellent example of Guercino’s shift toward a less intuitive style in the aftermath of his sojourn in Rome. Transcending her contemplation of death and repentance of sins, the Magdalene looks heavenward in a rapture that is echoed by the shaft of light from the upper left. Because her figure derives from a painting of around 1619, a Raising of Lazarus in the Louvre, Guercino’s development is all the more apparent. The composition is more deliberate, its forms more constructed, his touch more measured. What painting may have lost in restless vitality, it has gained in solemn power. Later, however, these tendencies would lead to an ever more self-conscious, and nonetheless beautiful, approximation of Baroque classicism. When Guercino went to Rome in 1621-23, he brought with him the style of the Suida-Manning Collection’s exquisite Landscape with Tobias and the Angel. That style, its optical intensity and sensory appeal, offered an alternative to the more schematic naturalism of Caravaggio and the early classicism of Annibale Carracci. Guercino, however, was reciprocally affected by those prevailing currents, as well as by the weight of the city’s earlier artistic traditions. Just as other painters like Giovanni Lanfranco and Pietro da Cortona began to explore and extend the possibilities of Guercino’s style, he tempered them.