The Magdalene Reading

The white pot beside the reader helps identify her. It held the oil associated with Mary Magdalene, a follower of Christ. Rogier van der Weyden, a painter working in the fifteenth-century Netherlands, places her in a richly furnished room wearing the clothes of his own time. Her head and legs curve around her bent knees, gathering her attention towards the book. Look at its two columns of writing, coloured initials and protective white covering. The fine details make the act of reading feel private and absorbed. Then notice the figures cut off at the edges. Part of a man stands behind Mary, and another person’s toes appear beneath a red robe to the left. This panel was once the lower right corner of a much larger painting of the Virgin and Child with saints, made for a church in Brussels. The surviving fragment gives Mary a space of her own that she did not originally possess. Her sumptuous dress, book and ointment pot still explain both her wealth of detail and her place in the religious gathering.