Prayer of the Penitent Monks

This Prayer of the Penitent Monks is among Magnasco's latest works, demonstrating his lifelong commitment to the monastic subjects that had defined his career from the beginning. The persistence of the penitent monks theme across sixty years of production — from his earliest Milanese works around 1700 to his final Genoese paintings in the 1740s — reflects how deeply this subject answered his particular visual and psychological interests. His late penitent monks bring the formal economy of long practice to the subject: fewer figures, simpler settings, but the same intense postures of prayer and self-abnegation that had characterized his most ambitious earlier treatments.

The praying monks are rendered with the thin, attenuated forms and flickering light that characterize Magnasco's late style, the figures seeming almost to dissolve in the intensity of their devotion.