Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
A pairing without an hour
The title names two people and no event. Mary Magdalene appears at several points of the narrative — at the anointing, at the cross, at the tomb on the Sunday morning — and each of those is a distinct episode with its own iconography. A title that gives only the two names does not say which, and the record adds nothing that would settle it, so this page does not choose one.
How that sits with the cycle
Uncomfortably, which is itself informative. The strength of an episode-based reading is that most titles in this catalogue place themselves: a baptism is at the start of the ministry, an entombment at the end of the Friday. When a title names only a relationship, the work drops out of the sequence and has to be read as a devotional pairing instead.
What the record holds
The catalogue names Peter Paul Rubens, dates the work to 1618, and places it in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. It measures 147.2 x 130.1 cm, upright and close to square. The style is entered as Baroque and the artist as Flemish. The subject fields class the work as a group composition and under cultural heritage, mythology and fantasy — notably, this entry carries no religious classification at all. The measured palette reads as yellow.
Sources
3 references- Rubens, Peter Paul — Getty ULAN
Flemish painter, 1577-1640
- Mary Magdalene — Wikipedia
Mary Magdalene (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, travelled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resu
- Christ and the Repentant Sinners - Peter Paul Rubens — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
