For about 250 years, Georges de La Tour was forgotten. He had been a celebrated painter in Lorraine, a court favorite of the French king, and when he died in 1652 his name simply dropped out of the history books. The German scholar Hermann Voss started to put his work back together in 1915, and today La Tour is treated as one of the great painters of candlelight.
The Penitent Magdalen shows why. A woman sits in a dark room with a single candle in front of a mirror, and her face is lit from the side. A skull rests on her knee and her hand rests on it, almost absently. The candle shines in the mirror, so one flame becomes two. Everything else is still.
The imagery is a vanitas, a reminder that beauty fades. Mary Magdalene's traditional attributes were a jar of ointment and long loose hair, but La Tour strips them away, leaving a woman in a plain white blouse and a heavy dress, simply thinking.
The idea that Mary Magdalene was a reformed prostitute is also a little-known historical accident. The Gospels never say it. In 591 Pope Gregory I preached a sermon that merged her with another woman, an unnamed sinner. The mix-up shaped a thousand years of art and was officially corrected by the Catholic Church in 1969.
La Tour painted several Magdalens, and each is a variation on the same quiet idea. A candle burns, a woman looks inward, and the viewer is left to ask what she sees.
La Tour's The Penitent Magdalen appears on our: