The Penitent Magdalene

Born in Piedmont, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as Sodoma, would become the leading artist in Siena in the early sixteenth century. He trained in the workshop of Martino Spanzotti in his native city from 1490 until 1493, and may have travelled to Milan and studied the work of Leonardo, whose dramatic influence can be markedly felt in Sodoma’s work. It was in Tuscany though, and particularly Siena, that he found great fame and success, working initially on commissions that included frescoes for the monastery of Sant’Anna in Camprena near Pienza and the decoration of the cloister of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, which he completed in 1508 with stories from the life of Saint Benedict.

He moved to Rome, working alongside Bramantino, Perugino and Lorenzo Lotto but stayed only a year before returning to Siena to continue a flourishing relationship with the Chigi family, who would become a major patron in the subsequent years; his decoration in 1516 of Agostino Chigi’s villa in Rome, the Farnesina, was perhaps his crowning achievement. Sodoma’s posthumous reputation was arguably adversely affected by Vasari’s licentious account of his life: it clouded the esteem in which he was held in his lifetime, as a worthy heir to Raphael and Michelangelo, capable of bringing together strong naturalist tendencies and a sense of classical form, a harmony exemplified in this beautiful Penitent Magdalene. The canvas dates to the latter part of his career, circa 1530, around the same moment as the Adoration of the Magi for the church of Sant’Agostino in Siena, which shows similar handling in the construction of the figures, and the Saint Catherine in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, whose facial features are comparable to the Magdalene here.