Rethinking Savoldo's <em>Magdalenes</em>: A "Muddle of Maries"?

Abstract

The luminously veiled women in Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo’s four Magdalene paintings have consistently been identified by scholars as Mary Magdalene at the tomb on Easter morning, yet these physically and emotionally self-contained figures are atypical of representations of the saint in the early Cinquecento, when she is most often seen as an exuberant observer of Christ’s Resurrection in scenes of the Noli me tangere or as a worldly penitent in half-length. A reconsideration of the four Magdalene images alongside contemporary imagery and a myriad of early Christian, Byzantine, and Italian accounts of the Passion, instead suggest that Savoldo, in these paintings, adds a new, more complex response to a millennium-old discussion about the respective roles of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. At the expense of iconic clarity, the painter whom Vasari described as “capriccioso e sofistico” appears to have created a multivalent image to accommodate both the conflicting accounts present in written sacred and hagiographic texts and to the intellectual appeal of the aporetic in the sixteenth century.