By Josephine McKenna
Mary Magdalene may have been identified among the 300 tangled figures depicted in Michelangelo’s celebrated Sistine Chapel masterpiece after a centuries-long hunt.
Sara Penco, an Italian art restorer, said her research suggested that a blonde woman in The Last Judgment artwork, who is depicted kissing a wooden cross held by a figure said to be Jesus Christ, was the famous female disciple.
“I am firmly convinced that this is Mary Magdalene … the intimacy with the cross, the yellow dress and the blonde hair but also the whole context in which Michelangelo places this figure to underscore her importance,” Penco told a media conference in Rome on December 10.
Art experts have long tried to identify the wide-eyed woman who appears in the far right-hand corner of the fresco on the wall behind the Vatican chapel’s altar.
However, Penco, who specialises in Renaissance and baroque art, said her research should finally put an end to the mystery.
She said: “The fresco was screaming that something was missing. Michelangelo was an expert painter, he was very cultured, he was someone who knew the dynamics of the church very well, he knew the gospels, and he could not have forgotten her.”
Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome.Credit: Eric Nathan / Alamy Stock Photo
Mary Magdalene, according to the gospel, was one of Christ’s loyal disciples who accompanied him as he spread his message.
Once portrayed as a repentant prostitute, she is now widely regarded as a saint by Catholic and other Christian faiths.
Penco, who consulted various studies by scholars and theologians before conducting her own research, said the gospel often describes Mary Magdalene at the moment of Christ’s redemption, and she was fundamental in how salvation could be achieved.
She said: “The cross-bearer is looking in the direction of Mary Magdalene, it is as if he is estranged from the composition looking towards the woman peacefully holding the wood and the cross.”
Her findings will be published this week in the 240-page book Mary Magdalene in Michelangelo’s Judgement.
Professor Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, from the Gregorian University Department of History and Cultural Heritage in Rome, has endorsed the claim.
She wrote in the book’s forward: “With great intuition, Sara Penco has discovered something that defines the being of art.
“We can clearly see how iconography and theology are linked in Penco’s reasoning to form a vision: the woman kissing the cross has an important role, even if she appears hidden on the edges of the image.”
The Last Judgment, which took Michelangelo Buonarroti four years to complete, attracts more than 5 million visitors to the Sistine Chapel every year.
Painted between 1537 and 1541, it depicts the Second Coming of Christ and the Apocalypse and shows human souls and angels, many of them naked, either ascending to heaven or descending into hell.
Last month, new research claimed Michelangelo may have depicted a woman suffering from breast cancer in his fresco of a biblical flood on the chapel’s ceiling.
Telegraph, London
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