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
A MYSTERIOUS BEAUTY AND A FRENCH ATTRIBUTION: THE SLEEPING MAGDALEN OF BUDAPEST Among the most fascinating and appealing paintings in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts is a canvas depicting a richly attired and bejeweled young woman resting, apparently asleep, on a brocade cushion (fig. 23). It is also a work problematic as to its origins, attribution and subject matter. Perhaps the most compelling question for the general public is who she is. To this initial query, at least, a convincing solution has emerged, ably summarized in 1995 by István Barkóczi. 1 The painting has been cropped on all four sides, possibly significantly, contributing to the unusual proportions and focused monumentality of the figure. 2 The girl is almost certainly intended to be an image of the Magdalen, one of the most popular subjects in post-Counterreformation Catholic Europe. While she apparently has lost her attributes of ajar of unction or a skull, she holds a handkerchief, and her face and nose and eyes appear reddened with tears. In the aftermath of her emotional catharsis, she apparently has fallen asleep in the calm of her conversion. The outstanding precedent for this image of the sleeping Magdalene, also a figure with face reddened, indeed swollen in tears, seated alone, head down and surrounded by jewelry, is Caravaggio's early painting of the seated Repentant Magdalen, painted about 1593-94 (now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, fig. 24). Caravaggio's figure also is set isolated in an interior, dressed in rich damasks and a finely detailed white chemise with full sleeves, surrounded by her jewels and, her hands crossing each other in her lap, her head reclined in sleep or deep meditation. Interestingly that painting, one of Caravaggio's earliest in Rome, has the appearance of a genre picture adapted into a religious work, and Bellori even asserts that Caravaggio first created the work as a study of a girl in a small chair drying her hair. The artist, Bellori states, only subsequently added in the ointment jar, jewels, etc., "la finse per Madalena [pretending that she is the Magdalen]." 3 At this time in Rome, the view of the Magdalen as a former harlot was undergoing revision. In the Italian translation of Cesare Baronius's Annals of the Church, published in 1590, the author asserted that she was not a whore, but rather a vain and indulgent woman ("incontinente, e vana") who repented. 4 It has also been demonstrated that Caravaggio's 1 Barkóczi, I. in Treasures of Venice: Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (exh. Minneapolis Institute of Arts), New York 1995, no. 21, pp. 120. 122. 2 Furthermore, a strip, measuring 8 cm, has been added across the top of the painting, very likely during the nineteenth century. See commentary in Barkóczi op.cit. (n. 1) no. 21, endnote 1, p. 216. 3 See the discussion of this point in Hibbard, H., Caravaggio, New York 1983, pp. 50-51; Bellori, G. P., Le vite de'pittori, scultori e architetti modernt, Rome 1672, p. 203. 4 Discussed in Hibbard op.cit. (n. 2) p. 51.
