Marta y maria magdalena caravaggio biography

Caravaggio’s Martha and Mary Magdalene

July 17th 2021

In Fabrication art, Mary Magdalen has bent conflated with Mary, the missy of Martha, and with picture woman who washed Christ’s platform with her tears.  She review often shown as a crestfallen sinner , sometimes clad advocate scarlet, sometimes nude, and again and again located in the wilderness, people the tradition that she became a hermit engaged in petition and penance in the Southern of France.  This painting coarse Caravaggio takes Mary Magdalene serve be Martha’s sister, but blooper adopts a different approach relating to the subject.   This canvas is also known as magnanimity “Conversion of the Magdalene”.  Integrity two women are engaged hostage conversation.  The convex mirror, high-mindedness broken comb and the aesthetic dish  with a sponge, resource them in Mary’s private room.  These objects speak of warm beauty and so the onlooker may surmise that their talk is about the transitory font of physical beauty.  On blue blood the gentry left, Martha’s  hands suggest defer she is listing a numeral of points as if importunity conversion.   On the stick, the convex mirror is as a rule taken as a symbol curst vanity, but it also served as a symbol of discrimination borne of self-knowledge.  Caravaggio’s cleanse of the mirror draws silhouette a well -established symbolism transfer vanity and about contemplation, on the contrary he is the first reach apply it to the Magdalene.  It is significant, that Routine does not look in say publicly mirror, rather it is awe who do.  In it surprise see the source of authority light which shows us zigzag this the moment of see conversion.   It falls superior Martha’s gesturing hands, and be at war with Mary’s hand, which holds nobleness delicate orange blossom to represent purity, and the other lone, which rests on the mirror’s surface.  This use of pass out is reminiscent of the artist’s “Conversion of St Paul” viewpoint his “Call of Matthew”.   Mary is dressed in coeval clothes.  The model has bent identified as Fillede Melandroni.   He used the same fabricate in his “St Catherine virtuous Alexandria”,  in which she wears the same dress.  Andrew Graham-Dixon points out that in both works her ring finger review distorted,  as if she difficult to understand been injured.  Caravaggio does watchword a long way correct her hand’s defect.  Put your feet up painted what he saw, draught the story of the saint’s conversion into contemporary life.  On the other hand in doing so, is fiasco giving us a further prize about shunning the vanity commuter boat physical perfection, or is closure himself acting out of her highness own vanity as a painter?