A Mary Magdalene by Sandro Botticelli
Last night I was watching a documentary about Botticelli’s Inferno, a work I didn’t know about. The Medici commissioned Sandro Botticelli to illustrate Dante’s Inferno. Botticelli produced a book with images that were very different from the images that illustrated the books of his time. A lot of the original images were drawings on precious paper, a very expensive item at the time. He would score the drawing first, then go over the image with a special metal tip, and finally ink the drawing to produce the final piece. The Inferno image is composed of tiny images and it makes us wonder how he was able to depict such a small and detailed world. Learning about this work made me curious about whether this artist had painted a Mary Magdalene, since I had never seen one so far.
As expected, I found a Mary Magdalene by Sandro Botticelli. I haven’t found one by herself in my short research, but thought the detail above was very interesting and beautiful. It shows the dead Christ, and Mary Magdalene holding his head, but where other painters have given her an expression of intense pain, Botticelli gave her an expression that seems to me full of love, with her closed eyes and about to kiss him softly. Her forehead shows some tension, almost the same tension that a kiss would require. It feels as if she is speaking into his ear, telling him she is present in this extreme moment of human experience.
The transparency of her veil wrapping around them delicately emphasizes the tenderness of her touch.
Sandro Botticelli, painter of Venus being born, has also given the Magdalene the ethereal grace of the goddesses he painted as representations of ideal beauty.
It is interesting that in the full painting, the woman at his feet also looks like the Magdalene, with long wavy red hair that escapes her veil, and a pink dress that could be red. She looks like the woman who washes his feel with her tears and dries them with her hair. By this time the character of Mary Magdalene had been combined with this woman and with Mary of Bethany, so it’s unexpected to find them at both ends of the great piramid formed with Mary the Mother. I’m sure this must be a different saint, but it looks to me as two parts of the story in one scene.
I really love Sandro Botticelli. I will never forget standing in front of The Birth of Venus and seeing the painting in person. It makes you understand why people get struck ill in Florence after seeing too much beauty! I hope I can see this painting one day too.
For that, I need to get back to my art, to what I call my “real life.” Here is one more drawing on the path to my vision of the future. One more day of writing and drawing are reminders of this intention in action.
댓글