Today we went to the Villa Doria Pamphili. While we were there, we looked at a few pieces of Caravaggio’s work. Two paintings that I specifically remember are “The Flight into Egypt” and “Penitent Magdalena”.
Flight into Egypt:
The Council of Trent issued a number of decrees which prohibited artists from treating many popular legends which were now considered improbable. The story of the Holy Family's flight&emdash;only briefly sketched out in the Biblical account&emdash;survived the strictures of the Council and often appeared in painting from the end of the sixteenth century. Most favored was a representation of the holy family resting, wearing from their travels. Caravaggio's idyllic painting is an individualistic representation of this.
The artist ingeniously uses the figure of an angel playing the violin with his back to the viewer to divide the composition into two parts. On the right, before an autumnal river-front scene, we can see the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant in her left; on the left, a seated Joseph holding the musical score for the angel. Contrasting the unlikelihood of the event is the realistic effect of depiction, the accuracy of details, the trees, the leaves and stones, whereby the total impression becomes astonishingly authentic.
The statue-like figure of the angel, with a white robe draped around him, is like a charmingly shaped musical motif, and it provides the basic tone for the composition. It is an interesting contradiction&emdash;and at the same time a good example for the adaptability of forms.
There is no apparent precedence for a music-playing angel to make an appearance in the story of the flight into Egypt. Charming is Caravaggio's decision to actively involve St Joseph in the music-making.
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/bar_cvggo_flight.html
Penitent Magdalena:
An evolved Baroque Mary Magdalene is curiously seen in Caravaggio’s uniquely sensitivePenitent Magdalen of 1596-97, now in the Doria Pamphilij Gallery in Rome. Caravaggio’s treatment here is both sympathetic and idiosyncratic but visually correct only in regard to iconographic traditions of the Magdalene, This tradition, however, conflates four gospel texts that may have nothing to do with one composite woman nor do they necessarily all refer to the persona of Mary Magdalene, who is often said in modernity to be degraded into a sexual object of male fantasy.
The iconography Caravaggio employed here is both clever and innovative in many respects for its adherence to biblical text. In Caravaggio’s warm-colored tones bespeaking both her passion and Christ’s Passion, the Magdalene’s most typical visual attribute is the unguent vessel containing nard (Greek ναρδος from Hebrew or Aramaic נרד ) with which she is associated in tradition (rather than clearly supported from text) as having washed Christ’s feet with her sensuously long and lustrous reddish hair – and red is the color of sanguinity - after sacrificially pouring out its precious perfume (although here Caravaggio may be painting in advance of that biblical narrative moment). The same perfume nardus in Latin known from Pliny’s Natural History XXI.70 is probably from the Indian or Near Eastern desert plant Nardostachys jatamansi and is also called spikenard, its liquid color being golden red or orange like the Magdalene’s hair and the golden perfume hue seen here in Caravaggio’s painting. Other attributes are conveyed in the Magdalene’s putative life as a courtesan, implied by rich clothes and extravagant jewelry, and her body language of penitence is marked by her humble position, in this case close to the ground on a very low chair. What the Magdalene renounces in Caravaggio’s image is consonant with what has been noted in typical Pauline testimonia of the modest new woman of God - often suggested as a misogynistic text - who is unadorned by anything but grace: “not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls or expensive clothes” as St. Paul writes in I Timothy 2:9.
Many pictorial details encourage closer inspection. The biblical texts state that the perfume vessel which the woman (Mary Magdalene?) used on Christ – often mistranslated from the Koiné Greek New Testament as being of alabaster stone - was a glass alabastron (Greek ’αλαβαστρον), probably sealed in ampule form against desiccating air and oxidation; terribly expensive because vessel and perfume were to be used only once, the glass needing to be broken to release its perfume inside. Caravaggio depicts a glass vessel here, either deliberately or accidentally in closer accordance with the text, but perhaps better to highlight the gold transparence of the nard perfume as symbolic of the Magdalene’s pouring her life out. On her dress is another vessel or receptacle noted by Cinotti as a possible simile of the Magdalene herself and which she fills here in Caravaggio’s schemata. In this instance, the vessel on her dress bears a shell-like form as possibly representative of the Classical notion that shells (extrapolated from Hesiod’s Theogony) were one of the visual attributes of sea-born Venus to whose sacred cult most courtesans belonged either professionally or by practice as those who live for amor sacer. The perfume vessel shown in two distinct forms may be an accommodation of both traditions: the translucent glass form at her feet and also as an opaque white alabaster form on her dress. Vegetal motifs on her clothing may depict the source of the perfume as floral – and flowers are another attribute of Venus - but could in any case merely indicate the fertility which courtesans explicitly evoke. However one views Caravaggio's Magdalene, on the one hand his naturalism gives us opportunity to agree with Bellori that it is mostly a seated woman who could be anybody and on the other hand to disagree because Caravaggio's iconographic subtlety allows us to identify her by her perfume and hair and almost the moment of penitence when she rejects her former life as a voluptuary as the long traditions suggest.
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2009/03/caravaggios_mary_magdalene_ult.html
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