c.1577 - Malines - Rome - 1627
"St Mary Magdalene in a Landscape"
Oil on Panel, 50.5 x 40.5cm (20 x 16 inches)
Provenance
Private Collection, London from 1946
Note:
Dubois appears three times under different names in Thieme- Becker (1) as Pieter van den Houte, Pierre Dubois, and Pietro de Lignis. The family came from Malines and he probably trained as a painter on glass in Flanders; but he is already recorded in Rome by 1599 where he inherited a large house at Monterotondo as well as the whole of the estate from Veronica Lombarda. He worked with Giovanni Baglione and Carlo Oldrado according to the records of the Accademy of S. Luca and seems to have been a member himself by 1604. Described as a Frenchman from Malines, he married Dorotea Tempolini on the 14th October 1607. Most of his known works seem now to be in Spain but the significance of this is not clear (2).
This wholely original artist is in some ways closest to Elsheimer both in spirit and technique and it is interesting in this respect to note that his house on the Via del Babuino in Rome was only seven doors along from Adam Elsheimer's. The pictures are a clear document of the moment of the changing taste at the turn of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries. A wholely Flemish landscape is inhabited by a monumental already post-mannerist figure, though flowers, townscape and the love of detail recall earlier modes.
His works are often signed Pietro de Lignis, the latinised form of his name, or Italianised as del Legno. A St Catherine is in a private collection in USA (ex-AWL) and another version of that painting, with variations (chiefly the central figure of St Catherine is turned much more to the front and the angel emerging from the identical scalloped clouds is quite different) is in the Staatliche Kunstsammlung at Karlsruhe, formerly collection Onieva, Madrid (3). A copy was sold at Christies in New York (4) as 'Circle of Elsheimer' and a fourth version is in the National Gallery at Prague there attributed to Johann König (5). A related picture, 'The Adoration of the Magi' in the Prado, Madrid, is dated 1616.
The attribution of the present work is based on the almost identical pose of the main figure (except for the state of undress) and the identical handling of the clouds with their marked convexities opening to the four winds (in this case). The love of detail and handling of the minutest objects, and the horror vacui, are similar too, though here applied to a magical landscape instead of a cityscape littered with dead bodies.
The Giottesque Fresco in the Chapel of the Magdalene at Assisi shows the Saint carried by four winds, such as are seen mildly blowing in the top corner of the present painting. I have not been able to identify the significance of the kicking horse in the background but it is too prominent not to have a meaning.
The cult of the Magdalen has a long, curious and instructive history. To the Gospel writers (St John in particular) she was the first witness of the resurrection and earlier Christian writers describe her as the Bride of Christ, sometimes as the Apostle to the Apostles - she it was who first saw Christ and announced the resurrection to the other apostles. But by the sixth century she had become confused with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and with the unnamed repentant sinner who wipes the feet of Christ - and thereafter she is seen only as the redeemed whore, the magna peccatrix which phrase has only recently been dropped from the Roman Breviary, in part recognition at last that it may not be describing the right girl.
Nevertheless her cult was one of the most popular and hilarious, with bones for relic worship being stolen by monks and priests in order to set up shrines elsewhere, most famously at the greatest surviving Romanesque abbey church of Ste Marie-Madeleine, Vézelay which was started in 1096. Her image became one of the most pervasive icons throughout history, and nearly every figure painter used the Magdalene as an excuse to show sadness, horror, penitence, or else voyeuristic nudity in an acceptable format. Haskins, in a modern re-assessment has suggested that the Magdalen's "history can be seen as an epitome of the condition of women in Church and society throughout the Christian era". See Susan Haskins Mary Magdalene HarperCollins London 1993 who deals with the subject excitedly but also as comprehensively as anyone is likely to want for a long time.
It is worth noting that in the Greek Orthodox tradition she died and was buried in Ephesus, whence her relics were transferred to Constantinople under Leo VI in 899. This hypothesis seems rather more likely.
The above was written some ten years ago. Since then Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code has publicised views on Mary Magdalen as the wife of Christ and mother of his children, but his novella suffers from a total lack of supporting evidence.
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