The 12-Hour Art Expert by Noah Charney

Author:Noah Charney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

This later work by Donatello, in wood, depicts Mary Magdalene after she became a hermit in the desert. The story goes that after Christ’s death, Mary Magdalene traveled from the Holy Land by boat and landed in the south of France, near Marseille. (Fun fact: the shape of the madeleine cookie, the sort that Proust dipped into his tea and ate to prompt the sense memory of his childhood that begins In Search of Lost Time, is meant to look like Mary Magdalene’s boat.) There, she retreated into the desert and lived out the rest of her days as a hermit, clothed only in her extensive hair. This is a kind of creepy sculpture—if I see it out of the corner of my eye, I think it’s about to jump off its plinth and start crawling up the wall of the museum—and it is probably the most realistic sculpture ever made to that date. The figure really looks like a haggard old woman whose skin has baked into leather from the desert sun. There is humanity to it. Saints were usually idealized, perfectly beautiful and generic, but not here. If we believe the biblical story and consider it to be a historical document, this is a good depiction of how this old woman, living alone in the wilderness, probably would have looked. It is creepy, but also has a beauty to it, and it is certainly impressive that it is carved from polychromed wood.

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