The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Donatello · a single standing figure of Mary Magdalen as a penitent in the desert, carved in wood, prepared with gesso, painted and gilded, in the round, a little over life size · dated about 1453 to 1455, a date no contract documents and the scholarship disputes · for centuries in the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence, submerged there in the flood of 4 November 1966 and restored in the years after, and now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence · scored as the one figure, whole in its form; the dark overpaint removed in restoration, the flood and the losses of surface bear on its survival only
Mode
A devotional figure in painted wood, carved to the scale of a standing person; the new naturalism turned against the new ideal, the body shown wasted, aged and ugly
Mythos
The penitent in the wilderness, the self stripped to the bone; the hair that was vanity become the habit of penance; the beauty that time and choice consume
Phase
Dated about 1453 to 1455, the date disputed; for centuries in the Baptistery of San Giovanni; submerged in the flood of 1966 and restored after it; now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
Presentation
Wood, gesso, polychromy and gilding, the hair built up in places over the carving; one figure, frontal and freestanding, a little over life size, met at the height of a standing viewer
Register
Austere and fixed, of the dreadful kind: the shock of the face at close quarters, a quieter gathering in the hands, sallow flesh and the last gold
Scale
One body in one state, a life read backward from its end
Governing Proposition
A woman stands barefoot, wrapped from her shoulders to her shins in her own long hair, which is belted at the waist with a twist of the same hair. Her face is wasted, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sunk, the mouth open on missing teeth. Her forearms are raised and her hands come together before her chest without quite meeting. The wager of the figure is that the new anatomy of Florence, studied as closely as any antique body, can be turned against the new ideal and used to show repentance paid for in the body, holiness looking like ruin, and beauty surviving only as a trace of gold in the hair of a woman whose beauty was her sin.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Donatello, Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, was born about 1386 and died in 1466. The figure of Mary Magdalen as a penitent in the desert is dated here about 1453 to 1455. No contract documents that date, and the scholarship disputes it by decades: whether the figure is a work of its maker’s old age or of his middle years is one of the questions it still holds open. What is firm is where it stood. For centuries it was in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, the city’s baptismal church, and it is now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.
It is carved in wood, prepared with gesso, painted and gilded, and the hair is built up in places over the carving. It stands a little over life size for a gaunt woman, frontal and freestanding, with its weight slightly on one leg. It is wrapped from shoulder to shin in its own long hair, which is belted at the waist. The forearms are raised and the hands are brought together before the chest without quite meeting. The face is emaciated, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sunk, the mouth open with teeth missing; the feet and shins are bare, sinewed and bony.
The work scored here is that one figure, and nothing else is in it. Its form is whole. The later Magdalens it prompted in Florence, above all the wooden Magdalen in Santa Trinita, are context; so is Donatello’s earlier wooden Baptist in the Frari at Venice, and so are his late bronzes, the Judith and the San Lorenzo pulpits. The figure carries no words that can be quoted.
Movement II
The hair is the figure’s garment, its former beauty and the measure of its years in the desert, in one material. In legend the Magdalen in the desert is clothed by her own hair; here the hair that was her vanity has become the habit of her penance, so that a single substance carries the fall and the redemption. The belt at the waist is the only ornament the figure wears, and it is a twist of the same hair. There is no jar of ointment, no skull, no book. The archetype of the penitent in the wilderness, the self stripped to the bone, is carried in the body and not by attribute.
The hair is also the passage in which the making is most visible. It is carved and built into long wet-looking strands that fall, twist and are belted, with a matted, fibrous texture unlike any other surface in the figure, a texture marble could not take and bronze would harden. In the upper strands, at the shoulders, the gilding catches the light. Over the lower legs the hair falls in a repeated, drapery-like way and is handled more summarily than above; it is the one place where the figure says a thing more than once, and a shorter column would have said the same.
Take the gold at the shoulders and the feet at the base, the two most distant elements in the figure. The gold is the last trace of beauty; the feet, long, bony and planted, are the body reduced to bearing. One law holds them. Everything here is what remains after consumption, and every surface records the same drying, thinning and hardening: hair, skin, mouth and toes are cut to one pitch of austerity, and even the gold obeys, as residue and not adornment. The law governs one body in one state. It is held completely, over a small territory.
Movement III
The face is the argument. Seen at close quarters it is a shock: the cheeks cut away, the eyes deep in their orbits looking past the viewer, the lips drawn, the mouth open on missing teeth, as though speaking or praying with difficulty. The face is cut with a precision that makes absence visible. The anatomy below it is exact without being anatomical display: the cords of the neck, the skin pulled over the collarbones, the tendons at the wrists and ankles, the bones of the feet. The painting completes it, the flesh a sallow, sun-dried colour and the hair darker.
What the figure discloses can be stated. Repentance is paid for in the body. Holiness may look like ruin. The woman whose beauty was her sin is shown when the beauty has been spent and the soul has not yet arrived. The figure tells the truth about age, hunger and the body after renunciation, and it does so without consolation; it refuses the Magdalen’s usual double offer, beauty and contrition together. It is one condition, rendered in depth rather than an articulated social world, and part of its meaning is a mood, a dread felt before it is stated.
Its elevation is of that dreadful kind and of one register. It rises in the face; it rises again, more quietly, in the hands; it rises a third time in the whole silhouette, a dried column of hair and sinew standing on long feet, which reads from across a room as a thing burnt down to its frame. A single figure gives few places to rise, and there is no light, space or company in which the rising can recur. Beauty in the ordinary sense is refused by design, and the refusal is the point.
Movement IV
The forearms are raised from the elbows and the hands are brought toward each other before the chest, the fingers nearly touching. It is the one movement in the figure and the place where its meaning turns from ruin toward prayer. Whether the prayer is beginning, failing, or suspended, or whether the gesture is an offering, has been read variously, and the figure does not decide. The hands are the one place where the law of consumption strains toward its opposite, and they strain within it, as the remnant of a will. They also disclose something of devotion: that the gap between the hands may not close.
The inheritance had two strands. One was the Tuscan wooden penitent, a devotional type already present in the fourteenth century, the hair-clad Magdalen painted on panels and carved for churches. The other was the Florentine body that Donatello had done most to make, the classical nude, the beautiful youth, the dignified prophet. The figure turns the new naturalism against the new ideal: anatomy studied as closely as any antique body, used to show the body wasted, aged and ugly, at the scale of life and in the city’s baptismal church. No sculptor in Florence had made the penitent so unsparing, and a workshop at the height of its prestige risked the repellent in a culture that prized beauty. The medium and the type were inherited, and the cost was risked rather than paid.
In another form much of this would go. Painted wood is the instrument: its grain and dryness are the desiccated body, and the polychromy gives the residue of beauty as colour alone, which any monochrome version would lose. Frontal and freestanding at the height of a standing viewer, the figure meets that viewer as a person met in a church, not as an image on a wall; made a painting, the confrontation would go, and made in marble, the material would ennoble what the figure renounces. The format is still the column of the devotional type, and the back and sides add little to what the front knows.
Movement V
On 4 November 1966 the Arno flooded Florence and the figure, still in the Baptistery, was submerged. Its surface had long been covered by a later dark overpaint that hid the original colour, and the figure had long been read as brown and earthy. In the restoration that followed the flood the overpaint was removed and the original flesh colour and the gold in the hair were recovered, and the figure was shown as a painted, partly gilded one. That change made good rather than diminished, and it is still being absorbed by those who write about it. Wood and polychromy are fragile, and some loss of surface is real; the form that carries the meaning is whole.
Its pressure on the field came first in Florence. The wooden Magdalen in Santa Trinita, given to Desiderio da Settignano and finished by Benedetto da Maiano, answers it directly in type and medium. The figure showed that the Renaissance command of anatomy could serve the ascetic and the ugly, and with the late bronzes it marks its maker’s turn from the ideal toward expression. Beyond the city its reach is diffuse and cannot be named in particular works, and its modern standing as a forerunner of expressionist sculpture is presence rather than demonstrated influence. It holds the body, the sacred, consciousness, time, the legend and, by its place, the city’s baptismal church; it does not hold the family, labour, the state or any company.
The desk sets it two tenths below its maker’s bronze David at 8.8, whose reach and whose survival in bronze are larger; a tenth below Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ at 8.7, the nearest image of the body in extremity in the same half century; below the Isenheim Altarpiece at 9.1 and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at 8.9; and a tenth above Giacometti’s Walking Man I at 8.5, the emaciated standing figure five centuries on. One condition of the summit is unmet, Pressure on Tradition, and the sum is short of it as well. A woman stands in her own hair with the gold gone thin at her shoulders, her mouth open on missing teeth, and her hands rise toward each other and stop just short.
Act III · The Twelve
One figure, and the subtractive test finds almost nothing to remove. The hair cannot go: it is her garment, her former beauty and the measure of her years in the desert in one material. The hands cannot go: their not quite meeting is the one movement in the figure, the place where its meaning turns from ruin to prayer. The face, with its open mouth and missing teeth, is the argument; the long bony feet are its foundation. The belt at the waist is the one ornament, and it is the hair again. The scale is compelled, a body confronting a body. What yields a little is the fall of hair over the lower legs, repeated more than required. So few parts leave necessity little to prove under strain.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, and it holds outside fifteenth-century Florence: repentance is paid for in the body; holiness may look like ruin; the woman whose beauty was her sin is shown when the beauty has been spent and the soul has not yet arrived. The figure tells the truth about age, hunger and the body after renunciation without consolation, and it refuses the Magdalen’s usual double offer of beauty and contrition together. It discloses something of devotion too: that the gap between the hands may not close. Held at its gate and a tenth above it because the disclosure is one condition, deeply rendered, not an articulated social world; the hands are left open between hope and exhaustion, and part of the meaning is a dread felt before it is stated.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and real. Its places: the face at close quarters, the hollowed eyes looking past the viewer, the open mouth that seems to speak or pray with difficulty; the hands, where the figure gathers itself toward something it cannot see; and the whole silhouette, a dried column of hair and sinew rising from long feet, which reads from across a room as a thing burnt down to its frame. What holds the axis is frequency and range. A single figure gives few places to rise, and there is no light, space or company in which elevation can recur; the register is one, austere and fixed, and ordinary beauty is refused by design. It rises sharply and repeatedly in one key, below works that rise across a vault or a crowded field.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, and bearing load. The figure carries the penitent in the wilderness, the oldest Christian archetype of the self stripped to the bone, and carries it in the body, not by attribute: there is no jar of ointment, no skull, no book. The hair is the built myth. In legend the Magdalen in the desert is clothed by her own hair; here the hair that was her vanity has become the habit of her penance, one substance carrying fall and redemption. Behind it stand the vanitas and the ages of woman, the beauty that time and choice consume, and the particulars stay particular: these teeth, this belt, these feet. Held at 8.6 because the archetype is one figure’s and largely inherited from the legend’s imagery; the work deepens a built myth more than it builds a new one.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance has two strands. One is the Tuscan wooden penitent, a devotional type already present in the fourteenth century, the hair-clad Magdalen painted on panels and carved for churches. The other is the Florentine Renaissance body that Donatello had done most to make: the classical nude, the beautiful youth, the dignified prophet. The departure is to turn the new naturalism against the new ideal, anatomy studied as closely as any antique body and used to show the body wasted, aged and ugly, at the scale of life, in the city’s baptismal church. No sculptor in the city had made the penitent so unsparing, and a workshop at the height of its prestige risked the repellent in a culture that prized beauty. The cost was risked rather than paid, and the medium and type were inherited.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a form and much goes. Painted wood is the instrument: the grain and dryness of the material are the desiccated body; the polychromy gives the flesh its sallow, sun-dried colour and the hair its gold, so that the residue of beauty is present only as colour and is lost in any monochrome version; the built-up hair has a matted, fibrous texture that marble could not take and bronze would harden. Frontal and freestanding at the scale of life, it meets the viewer as a person met in a church, not as an image on a wall. Make it a painting and the confrontation goes; make it marble and the material ennobles what the figure renounces. Held below 9 because the column-like format is the devotional type’s, and the back and sides add little to what the front knows.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than five centuries of looking, and the questions remain open. The date is disputed by decades, and with it whether this is a work of old age or of Donatello’s middle years. The hands are read as prayer beginning, prayer failing, or a gesture of offering; the face as ecstasy, exhaustion or speech. The restoration after the flood changed the object’s reception, revealing colour and gold under a dark overpaint and turning a figure long read as brown and earthy into a painted, partly gilded one, a change still being absorbed. It has been read as devotional realism, as an anticipation of modern expressionism and as a study of the aged body, and it yields on return, above all in the face and the hands. The questions are fewer than a populous picture or a long text sustains, and the literature narrower than on the great narrative works.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is Florentine sculpture of the middle fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the figure established that the Renaissance command of anatomy could serve the ascetic and the ugly, not only the heroic, and made the penitent a confrontation at the scale of life; with the late bronzes it marks its maker’s turn from the ideal toward expression. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wooden Magdalen in Santa Trinita, Florence, given to Desiderio da Settignano and finished by Benedetto da Maiano, answers it directly in type and medium. Beyond Florence the reach is diffuse: later polychrome penitents share its programme without a line that can be traced from it, and its modern standing as a forerunner of expressionist sculpture is presence more than demonstrated influence. The particular reach is regional, and it holds the axis a tenth below its gate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five and a half centuries. Form: whole. The hair, the face, the hands and the feet stand as carved, and no part that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuously in view, for centuries in the Baptistery and since its restoration in the cathedral museum; fame adds little. Fabric: here is the charge. Wood and polychromy are fragile. The figure was submerged in the flood of 1966, and its surface had earlier been covered with a dark overpaint that hid the original colour; restoration removed it and recovered the flesh colour and the gold, which makes good rather than diminishes, but some loss of surface and the vulnerability of the material are real. Centuries, form whole, fabric damaged and heavily treated: the low end of its row.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of carved and painted wood at the scale of life, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load. The anatomy of the wasted body is exact without being anatomical display: tendons at ankles and wrists, the bones of the feet, the cords of the neck, the skin pulled over the collarbones. The face is cut with a precision that makes absence visible, the teeth gone, the lips drawn, the eyes deep in their orbits. The hair is the virtuoso passage, carved and built into long wet-looking strands that fall, twist and are belted, a texture unlike any other in the figure. The polychromy is part of the work: sallow flesh, darker hair, gold catching the light. The costs: the figure is frontal and somewhat columnar, and the lower hair is handled more summarily than the upper.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gold-lit strands of hair at the shoulders, the last trace of beauty, and the bony, planted feet at the base, the body reduced to bearing. One law holds them: everything in the figure is what remains after consumption, and every surface records the same drying, thinning and hardening. Hair, skin, mouth and toes are cut to one pitch of austerity; even the gold obeys, since it is residue and not adornment. The near-meeting hands are the one place where the law strains toward its opposite, and they do so within it, as the remnant of will. Nothing in the figure contradicts it. But the range is one body in one state, and narrowness is not coherence: the law is held completely over a small territory.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: the body, in its age, hunger and decay; the sacred, as penance and prayer; consciousness, in the face and in the intention of the hands; time, in a life read backward from its end, beauty to ruin; the legend and its scripture, the sinner and the saved; and, by its place, the city’s baptismal church and the community that came to it. They are integrated in one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no natural order beyond the desert the figure implies, and no company. A single standing saint is the form, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Inevitable, The Swerve, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.8. Carving and painting exact enough to make absence visible, in the face, the tendons and the built-up hair; a form whole after about five and a half centuries, through a flood and a heavy restoration; a figure from which almost nothing can be removed; a turn of the new anatomy against the new ideal; painted wood as the instrument of a desiccated body; and one law of consumption from the gold at the shoulders to the planted feet.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: the body, the sacred, consciousness, time and the legend are held in one figure, and the family, labour, the state, the natural order and any company are absent. Below the rest of the twelve, The Sublime at 8.3: one austere register in a single figure, with few places to rise. Then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: questions fewer than a populous work sustains, and a reach that can be named in particular only in Florence.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear it by a tenth, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its particular reach regional. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Sublime at 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. The twelve sum to 102.6, an average of 8.55 that displays 8.6, in Tier IV; the work is held below the summit by Pressure on Tradition and by its aggregate, four tenths short of 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the figure, from many reproductions and from the published account of its restoration in outline; known well as an image and moderately well as a technical object, and not from a visit that can be dated. The work scored is the one standing figure of Mary Magdalen as a penitent, in carved, painted and gilded wood, now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, whole in its form. Its submersion in the flood of 4 November 1966, the dark overpaint removed in the restoration that followed, the recovery of the flesh colour and the gold, and the losses of surface bear on The Imperishable only. The later Florentine Magdalens it prompted, the Magdalen in Santa Trinita above all, Donatello’s wooden Baptist in the Frari at Venice and his late bronzes are context. The date of about 1453 to 1455 is documented by no contract and is disputed in the scholarship, and is given as disputed. The figure carries no words, and nothing is quoted. Left out as unverified: the species of the wood; the material with which the hair is built up; the height in metres; the year the restoration was finished; the earlier dates some have proposed; when the figure was first placed in the Baptistery; the legend’s conflation of the Magdalen with another desert saint as the source of the hair as garment; the claim that the carved penitents of the following decades in Florence took the figure as their model; any line from it to the polychrome penitents of other countries; and the extent of the surface lost in the flood and its treatment.