Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 98. (Budapest, 2003)

GOLDFARB, HILLIARD T.: A Mysterious Beauty and a French Attribution: The Sleeping Magdalen of Budapest

23. Claude Vignon: Sleeping Magdalen. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts picture follows a published Lenten sermon of the popular preacher and colleague of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, Francesco Panigarola (d. 1594). Panigarola spoke of the Magdalen removing her fine jewelry and ornaments, and closing her eyes against the sight of the interior that had witnessed her behaviour.

5 We are a very great distance sensually from Titian's bare-breasted repentant Magdalens of the 1530s and 1560s. Even moving into the second and the early third decade of the seventeenth century, the probable date for the Budapest picture, this approach to the chaste depiction of the Magdalen, while within Counter-reformation theological teachings, was still innovative.Caravaggio's Repentant Magdalen ambiguously mixed secular and religious subject matter in a way sufficiently striking to elicit Bellori's story in the later seicento. 5 See discussion of Panigarola in Brown, B.L., Between Sacred and Profane, in The Genius of Rome 1592-1623 (Royal Academy of Arts), London 2001, p. 292.