Saint Mary Magdalene

During the Baroque period, great interest was shown in the figure of Mary Magdalene, and artists often attempted to depict various scenes from her life. Although we know many images of the saint, including the scene of her conversion during a feast with Simon the Leper, the motif of the saint doing penance in the desert, praying in seclusion and meditating on the Passion of Christ, gained particular popularity in the eighteenth century.

In most paintings of that period, like the one from the collection of the National Museum in Lublin, Mary Magdalene was depicted as a beautiful young girl with luxuriant hair falling to her shoulders and a lowered dress exposing her breasts, which was supposed to refer to her debauched life before the expulsion of seven evil spirits from her body. Interestingly, according to legend, the saint was already elderly when she was in the desert. At that time, the saint, penitent in solitude, received new attributes.

In the hermit representations, Mary Magdalene, meditating on the death of Christ, holds in her hand a human skull and an open book. It is these symbols, called vanitas (the term is related to the main idea of the Book of Kohelet – Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas [Vanity Above Vanity and All Vanity]), that were to have a moralising effect on the viewer, pointing to the transience of life and its pleasures and the impermanence of earthly goods. Thus, it was the dead skull, the book or the extinguished candles that emphasised the importance of the scene of the mortification of the saint's body and focussed the faithful's attention on eternal life.