The revival of an Italian Baroque painting
Restoration of Giuseppe Vermiglio’s The Penitent Magdalene
MúzeumCafé 51.
In 1971 the Museum of Fine Arts bought a painting for the Collection of Old Masters depicting Mary Magdalene. The artist was believed to be an unknown 17th-century French master. In 2015 art historian ZsuzsannaDobos identified it as a work of Giuseppe Vermiglio, a prominent representative of the Lombardy-Piedmont early Seicento. The attribution raised the value of the work and its restoration began with the sponsorship of the Hungarian National Bank. Our knowledge of the life and work of Vermiglio is rather sketchy. He was probably born in Alessandria, Piedmont province in around 1587 and died there after 1635. He spent his first two decades in Rome, where he studied and worked. The records show that he adopted a rather bohemian lifestyle. In 1620 he returned to the north of Italy, where he continued to paint in Piedmont, as well as Mantua and Milan in Lombardy. His style, like that of many artists at the time, was strongly influenced by Caravaggio. Art historian Luigi Lanzi referred to Vermiglio as the “most outstanding painter in oil of the old Piedmont province”. Mary Magdalene’s story was a fashionable theme, since the Renaissance provided an opportunity for artists to represent and visually formulate the extremes of female principle and the beauty of the female body. Yet the representation of the penitent Mary Magdalene in the arts is based on a misunderstanding of the Scriptures, since the sinful woman who “began to wash the feet of Jesus with tears and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment” (Luke 7, 36-50) was actually unknown. The image of the disreputable but penitent woman originated from this scene. Hence Mary Magdalene is often depicted semi-naked, and often with a skull. In other versions she is presented reading, with a cross and a skull, often while ruminating. Vermiglio touches on both iconographic interpretations of the theme as this painting presents the repentant Mary Magdalene who lived a solitary life after Christ’s resurrection, while a version in Rome depicts her bending her head on her left hand and holding a skull in her right – a pose adapted from the elements of melancholic allegories. Unlike the frequent, early 17th-century depictions of a naked and sensual Mary Magdalene, the Magdalene in the Budapest painting has a chaste appearance, with her long reddish brown hair and clothes covering her shoulders and bosom. The painting has become an important part of the Lombardy-Piedmont Seicento works in the Old Masters Collection. Following its three-year-long restoration it will be exhibited in the Italian Baroque Room of the Museum of Fine Arts.