Saint Mary Magdalene playing the lute

The Master of the Female Half-Lengths' Saint Mary Magdalene Playing the Lute is one of the most distinctive images from this anonymous painter's signature series, combining the saint's traditional attributes with the musical subject matter that gives the master his modern name. The Magdalene as musician creates a subtle theological statement: her music, like her ointment and tears, becomes an offering of love and devotion to the Christ who forgave her. The lute's association with both sacred and secular music in sixteenth-century culture makes this image vibrate between devotional imagery and the secular feminine ideal of the cultivated woman at leisure.

The devotional composition is rendered with attention to the expressive and contemplative qualities that served the painting's function as an aid to prayer and meditation.