For the past 500 years, Mary Magdalene has been hiding in plain sight on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, according to new research by Italian art restorer and researcher Sara Penco. Her recently-announced book, Mary Magdalene in Michelangelo’s Judgement, makes the case for the Biblical woman’s forgotten presence in the Italian Renaissance fresco, which is chock-full of fascinating figures.
“The Fresco Was Screaming That Something Was Missing”
It was 25 years after he completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling that Michelangelo began working on The Last Judgment, a fresco that covers the entire altar wall of the Vatican City landmark. The scene depicts the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the final judgment of humanity as written in the New Testament. Over the course of four years, Michelangelo painted over 300 figures in The Last Judgment. Christ appears at the center of the composition, surrounded by the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, Saint Peter, and other prominent Catholic saints. Above them, the saved float heavenward while the damned sink beneath them.
Back in 2012, Sara Penco began researching how scholars had identified these figures over the years, as Michelangelo did not leave behind a definitive key. Penco was puzzled by the absence of Mary Magdalene in her research, whom she considered too central a figure to have been omitted from such a complex composition. “The fresco was screaming that something was missing,” Penco said at a recent press event in Rome, where she announced the publication of her book. “Michelangelo was an expert painter, he was very cultured, he was someone who knew the dynamics of the Church very well, he knew the gospels, and he could not have forgotten her.”
Michelangelo’s Mary Magdalene
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterOne overlooked figure in The Last Judgment caught Penco’s attention—a yellow-clad, wide-eyed woman kissing a wooden cross on the far-right-hand side of the fresco. “I am firmly convinced that this is Mary Magdalene,” Penco said. “The intimacy with the cross, the yellow dress and the blonde hair, but also the whole context in which Michelangelo places this figure to underscore her importance.”
Penco noted that Michelangelo painted Mary Magdalene in striking shades of yellow, a color associated with sin and madness. Interestingly, Michelangelo’s Mary does not direct her gaze towards Christ. Rather, she makes eye contact with the viewer, perhaps to remind them of their own status as a redeemed sinner in the Christian worldview. In the introduction of Penco’s book, curator Asia Graziano explained, “In the chaotic and anguished vision [of The Last Judgment] Michelangelo stages in the Sistine Chapel, the detail of Mary Magdalene alongside Christ the Redeemer is the key to understanding a message that Michelangelo addresses to himself and passes on as a legacy to humanity.”
The Conception and Controversy of The Last Judgment
Pope Clement VII originally commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment on the wall behind the Sistine Chapel’s altar. The fresco was completed under Pope Paul III. Previous depictions of the Last Judgment traditionally followed a familiar compositional order with a harmonious, heavenly upper half and a chaotic, hellish lower half.
Michelangelo’s version departed from this convention—and even somewhat from his earlier Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings—with its tumultuous arrangement and posing of figures throughout. The abundance of nudity, over-the-top musculature, and fleshy, cool color palette also flouted convention. Not long after the fresco’s debut, many of Michelangelo’s nude figures were covered up by painted-on drapery during the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation.
