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Lot Essay
Traditionally identified with the unnamed prostitute who anointed Jesus Christ's feet with ointment during the Supper in the House of Simon (Luke 7:37ff), Saint Mary Magdalene was one of the faithful women who followed Jesus to Galilee, witnessed his Passion, and was the first person present at the Resurrection. According to French tradition, the Magdalene (so identified after the name of her birthplace Magdala, near Galilee) was seized by infidels after the Resurrection and set adrift in a rudderless boat with her sister Martha and brother Lazarus, to be deposited by the tides on the shores of Marseille. She converted the Gauls, and lived for the next thirty years in rugged solitude in the wilderness near the French port, unknown to anyone, without food or water and sustained only by celestial banquets. According to the Golden Legend, 'Every day angels carried her to heaven at the seven canonical hours and she heard the glorious choruses of the heavenly hosts with her bodily ears. Then the angels brought her back to her solitude where, satisfied with these sweet feasts, she had no need of bodily food'. Natoire's painting depicts either this daily ritual, or the moment -- immediately following her death -- when the Magdalene is borne to heaven by angels; in either event, she is clearly identified by the angel who bears her ointment jar.
It is not known whether this small painting is a finished picture made for private devotion, or was intended as a highly worked up sketch for a larger altarpiece; Natoire executed a number of large-scale commissions for French churches of scenes from the life of the Magdalene, including a painting now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, and another still in situ in the Cathedral of Dax. Almost certainly, given the veneration of Mary Magdalene in France, it would have been made for a French client sometime between 1730, when Natoire returned to Paris from his years as a pensioner at the French Academy in Rome, and 1751, when he returned to Rome as the Director of the Academy.
The present painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Natoire's paintings by J. Patrice Marandel.
It is not known whether this small painting is a finished picture made for private devotion, or was intended as a highly worked up sketch for a larger altarpiece; Natoire executed a number of large-scale commissions for French churches of scenes from the life of the Magdalene, including a painting now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, and another still in situ in the Cathedral of Dax. Almost certainly, given the veneration of Mary Magdalene in France, it would have been made for a French client sometime between 1730, when Natoire returned to Paris from his years as a pensioner at the French Academy in Rome, and 1751, when he returned to Rome as the Director of the Academy.
The present painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Natoire's paintings by J. Patrice Marandel.