Mary Magdalene Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Puvis de Chavannes, who distinguished himself by his original and poetic treatment of mythological and allegorical themes, also contributed to the renewal of religious painting. Mary Magdalene, one of his last works, shows the saint in her last retreat, traditionally designated as the cave of Sainte-Baume in Provence. The landscape, whose aridity is accentuated by the brilliant light of the south, is reduced to a few rocks and the expanse of a cloudless sky. The figure, showed in an attitude of profound introspection, appears half-naked, lost in her thoughts. Although Puvis revisits here a theme that he had already explored thirty years earlier, he makes the choice to strip the composition of any superfluous element and removes the traditional attributes of the saint: with an extreme simplicity of means, the artist has been able to translate her abandonment, the depth of her melancholic contemplation.