One of his feet, livid and pierced, encounters at the foot of the Cross the bare shoulder of Magdalen.  It does not rest upon it, but grazes it.  The contact is scarcely noticeable, we divine it rather than see it.  It would have been profane to insist upon it, it would have been cruel not to have made us believe in it.  All Rubens’s furtive sensitiveness is in this imperceptible contact that says so many things, respects them all, and makes them affecting.

The sinner is admirable.  She is incontestably the best piece of work in the picture, the most delicate, the most personal, one of the best figures of women, moreover, that Rubens ever executed in his career that was so fertile in feminine creations.  This delicious figure has its legend; how should it not have, its very perfection having become legendary!  It is probable that this beautiful maiden with the black eyes, with the firm glance, with the clear-cut profile, is a portrait, and the portrait is that of Isabella Brandt, whom he had married two years before, and who had also sat for him for the Virgin in the wing of the Visitation.  However, while observing her ample figure, powdered hair, and plump proportions, we reflect what must some day be the splendid and individual charms of that beautiful Helen Fourment whom he is to marry twenty years later.

From his earliest to his latest years, one tenacious type seems to have taken up its abode in Rubens’s heart; one fixed idea haunted his amorous and constant imagination.  He delights in it, he completes it, he achieves it; to some extent he pursues it in his two marriages, just as he never ceases to repeat it throughout his works.  There is always something both of Isabella and of Helen in the women whom Rubens painted from either one of them.  In the first he puts a sort of preconceived trait of the second; into the second glides a kind of ineffaceable memory of the first.  At the date of which we treat, he possesses the first and is inspired by her; the other is not yet born, and still he divines her.  The future already mingles with the present; the real with the ideal.  As soon as the image appears it has this double form.  Not only is it exquisite, but not a feature is wanting.  Does it not seem as if in thus fixing it from the first day, Rubens intended that neither he nor anyone else should forget it?

As for the rest, this is the sole mundane grace with which he has embellished this austere picture, slightly monkish, and absolutely evangelical in character, if by that is meant the gravity of sentiment and style, and if we remember the rigours that such a spirit must impose upon itself.  In that case, you will understand, a great part of his reserve is as much the result of his Italian education as of the attention he gave to his subject.