Mary Magdalene

The Detroit Institute of Arts holds this Mary Magdalene from around 1505, showing the penitent saint in the idealized beauty that Renaissance painters used to suggest her earlier life of sin transformed by faith. Metsys’s Magdalene belongs to a tradition of beautiful female saints that allowed Netherlandish painters to display their mastery of rendering hair, skin, and costly garments within a devotional framework. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The Magdalene’s flowing hair—her traditional attribute recalling the moment she dried Christ’s feet—is rendered with extraordinary attention to individual strands and golden highlights. The complexion is luminous, painted in translucent layers.