This Magdalen of Correggio’s, “the least converted of sinners and the most adorable of penitents,” is she really, historically and liturgically the Magdalen of the House of Bethany, of the grotto de la Sainte-Baume in Provence?  No.  She recalls rather “cette dame de marque” who was evoked in the Seventeenth Century by the Carmelite Father Pierre de Saint-Louis in his sublime poem of accomplished burlesque; and does not the following verse hum in your ear: 

"Levres dont l’incarnat faisant voir a la fois
Un rosier sans epine, un chapelet sans croix,"

while the sinner

            ”... s’occupe a punir le forfait
  De son temps preterit qui ne fut qu’imparfait"?

This evidently is not at all the art of the Middle Ages, nor its saints, whose vestment was sackcloth and whose body was a mere lay figure for a soul devoted entirely to purity, to simplicity, to mysticism, and to the other world.  In the Sixteenth Century, however, people took the sackcloth from the saints and dressed them in flesh.  Then was produced a kind of revival of paganism, of naturalism, of life; and religious art, in its flesh and colouring, no longer created anything but an Olympus of beautiful maidens, or, at least, noble goddesses.  Correggio’s Magdalen belongs to this artistic cycle and the painter executed it in the noonday splendour of those qualities, the dawn of which glows in Parma at St. Paul’s.  Correggio is not a mystic, he is a voluptuous naturalist, and from him to the realist Caravaggio, “the grinder of flesh,” and the exuberant Rubens, who gave much study to Correggio, the distance is not very great and the decline is fatal.  But, in the meantime, where shall we find more grace, or seductiveness—­under this conversion complicated with memories—­than in Correggio’s Magdalen?

In hagiographal literature we find a work of similar tone and charm:  Marie Madeleine, by P. Lacordaire, an exquisite little book written with tenderness and piety, which deliciously calls up before us the Magdalen of repentance and love, “the loving woman accustomed to the delights of contemplation and needing only to see in her heart him whom in other days she saw under the transparent veil of mortal flesh.”

It must be confessed that Correggio was constantly preoccupied with charm and with that skilful coquetry that sports with every grace.  This is a subtlety of purely personal qualities; but let others beware of a systematic affectation!  In this way Correggio did not found a school, but he had imitators, among whom was Parmigiano, who by dint of study and in search for grace—­the most natural thing in the world—­most often fell into affected and conventional ways.

    Jouin, Chefs-d’oeuvre:  Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture
    (Paris, 1895-7).

BANQUET OF THE ARQUEBUSIERS

(VAN DER HELST)