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The Penitent Magdalen by Carlo Dolci (Italian) - Oil on canvas / c. 1670 - Davis Museum at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) #womeninart #art #fineart #oilpainting #CarloDolci #artwork #ItalianArt #TheDavis #womensart #DavisMuseum #portrait #ReligiousArt #17thCenturyArt #ItalianArtist #Dolci
A frequent subject in seventeenth-century European painting, the Penitent Magdalene is caught here in a moment of fervid prayer, evidenced by her clasped hands and teary eyes raised to the heavens. This type of picture normally served as an aid to private religious, specifically Catholic, practice: the viewer could meditate on the skull as a symbol of mortality and the alabaster jar, which figures in biblical texts, as a symbol of devotion to Christ. Although seventeenth-century patrons tended to favor the looser and more expressive brushstrokes of artists like Salvator Rosa, Dolci painted his pictures slowly and with steadfast attention to detail, to great acclaim. Similar in dimensions to a picture of Saint Jerome reading, this work may once have hung beside it in the collection of the Florentine Agnolo Teri. Dolci painted mostly conventional religious subjects. Like Michelangelo and Botticelli 150 years before him, he worked in Florence in the employ of the Medici family. More than mere merchant power brokers, as they were in the 15th century, the Medici now enjoyed the status of Grand Dukes with an international profile. Florence itself, however, had become an artistic backwater. Even in Rome, the innovative energy generated by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio earlier in the century was dissipating; in Florence, painting had calcified into a pompous, idealized naturalism that relied heavily on lush flesh and plentiful drapery. Within this context, Dolci’s paintings stand out for their enamel-like finish, strong coloring, and subtle lighting. Eschewing the painterly — it is hard to believe that, even if geographically distant, he is a near-exact contemporary of Rembrandt — Dolci creates surfaces that are so softly fine-grained and meticulous with lighting that absorbs our attention, that they could only have been painted by a master.
February 21, 2025 at 11:35 PM