Martino Altomonte’s Magdalen

Paintings of the Magdalen were produced in great quantities during the Baroque period – the subject seems to have been popular. It has been suggested, with regard to versions painted by Titian, that this was partly due to the fact that it permitted painters to depict a (semi)nude woman, and that the buyers were predominantly men.

Martino Altomonte’s painting at the Alte Galerie in Schloss Eggenberg, however, was commissioned by the Dominican nuns in Graz and was surely not meant to excite the male viewer. On the contrary, it represented a chaste model for female onlookers and stressed the ‘poor’ life of those who took the veil. Who were they, and how did these women ‘read’ this painting, and its presumable pendant, the Saint Jerome in the Wilderness? In the Dominican convent lived nuns of noble descent and from the rich middle class, as well as lay sisters; even adolescent girls stayed there since it functioned as a boarding school. Altomonte’s painting represented something different for all of these groups, related to their social position, but it also seemed to oppose their social standing.

This talk will aim to clarify why the Magdalen was such an attractive subject for a painting in this Dominican context, and discuss how its iconography tells us more about what society expected of well-to-do women and how they could navigate those expectations.