Saint Mary Magdalene

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Saint Mary Magdalene from around 1515 shows the penitent saint with the beauty and elaborate hair that Renaissance painters used to evoke her former worldly life. Metsys’s Magdalene paintings were among his most commercially successful devotional works, combining religious sentiment with an aestheticized female beauty that appealed to the prosperous collectors of Antwerp’s merchant class. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The Magdalene’s cascading golden hair and luminous skin are rendered with Metsys’s most refined technique, the sfumato modeling of the face showing clear Leonardesque influence. The ointment jar, her traditional attribute, is painted with still-life precision.