Mary Magdalene

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

The young woman in this smoothly-finished drawing is Mary Magdalene, identified by the jar of ointment with which she anointed Jesus’s feet. The saint is drawn in black chalk, which creates a striking contrast with the grey background of the paper and the many touches of white heightening. While her robe is set down with sharp outlines, the lighter accents in the face give it a soft aura.

Franz Koenigs acquired this drawing in 1928 as a sheet by the Northern Italian artist Bernardino Luini (1480/1482-1532), an attribution that has remained unchanged ever since. Although similar soft portraits of female saints and noble figures are typical of this artist’s paintings, this drawing of Mary Magdalene is very probably not by Luini. In our drawing, for instance, the eyes are slightly odd – the right eye is larger and placed lower than the left. Compared with Luini’s portrait studies with their refined and animated style, such as a drawing in Paris,^[1] the figure in the Rotterdam drawing is flat and stiff.  

There is a black chalk drawing of the head of a young woman that is very similar to our Mary Magdalene in Florence, where it is attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari (1477/1478-1546).^[2] The head tilted slightly to the right, the hairstyle with the striking centre parting, the positioning of the eyebrows and the dimple in the chin are prominent in both the Florentine and the Rotterdam drawing. Aside from these physical likenesses, however, Ferrari’s delicately drawn young woman has considerably more expression in her face. The Rotterdam drawing, with its detailed execution, which also has few pentimenti, has much less visual impact and is probably a copy after another work for which the Florentine drawing may well have served as an example. The pictorial idiom of Ferrari and Luini, both of whom spent the greater part of their lives in and around Milan and whose styles have overlapping features, was widely followed in Northern Italian art in the seventeenth century. It is therefore likely that our Mary Magdalene was made after an example by one of these artists.