Traditionally identified as the woman who was a sinner and wept on Christ’s feet and wiped away her tears with her hair (Luke 7:36-50), Mary Magdalene is shown here as the hermit saint she became upon giving up her life of moral decadence, after her encounter with the Savior. She kneels in prayer at the entrance to her cave and raises her eyes to heaven, eyes that are perhaps disproportionately large but that are emphatically windows to her redeemed soul and that also heighten her feminine allure. She is dressed in rough plaited straw, yet her violet satin sleeve and spectacular red silk drape suggest a former life of luxury. On the stone steps to the right are a whip for self-flagellation, and a jar of ointment, which recalls both the perfume with which she anointed Christ´s feet and the expensive spices she took to his tomb on Easter morning to embalm his corpse. The skull enveloped in shadow at the right beside the blasted tree trunk helps her meditate on her own mortality. Her attribute par excellence in this painting, however, is her long, flowing golden head of hair: it falls generously around her naked shoulder and down by her side beneath her waist, alluding to the scandalous gesture of love she showed toward Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisse. Ribera’s fascination with long hair is apparent in all his Magdalenes, from the early Raising of Lazarus to the Crucifixion in Osuna; in all his Lamentations and Pietàs; and in his representations of the Immaculate Virgin and his Saint Agnes. Ribera rarely shows nudity in his paintings. His Magdalenes almost never reveal their breasts, and even his Venuses are fully clad; yet the sensual nature of the saint is eloquently expressed here through her spectacular mane of hair, the golden highlights of the rich and dense curls painted in impastoed strokes of intense yellow.

The painting is among a group of eight full-length single-figure composition of saints by Ribera that in 1658 were in the Madrid collection of Don Jerónimo de la Torre, a member of the Royal Council and secretary of State of Flanders. The series included four pictures that are now in the Prado -this Mary Magdalene, Saint John the Baptist in the Desert, Saint Mary of Egipt, and Saint Bartholomew- and for others, of Saints Onophrius, Paul the Hermit, Agnes, and Sebastian. The entailed collection to which these pictures belonged was dispersed from 1718 on, and the four Prado paintings are subsequently recorded in the 1772 inventory of the Palacio Real in Madrid as having recently entered the royal collection from that of the Marqués de los Llanos, almost certainly Gabriel de Olmedo y Aguilar (1704-1758). The Magdalene is mistakenly identified there as the rarely represented Saint Thais, a wealthy and beautiful courtesan in fourth-century Egypt who converted to a strictly penitent monastic life. This error was probably due, as suggested by Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, to some devout and overly erudite eighteen-century scholar milling around the palace; surprisingly, the identification was honored at the Prado as late as 1996. It was previously thought that the Prado series had been conceived as a quartet that paired off two young male and female saints, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (or Thais), with an older pair, Bartholomew and Mary of Egypt; now that we know that these paintings formed part of a larger group, the idea should be abandoned.

Sometime between 1718 and 1772, the four paintings now in the Prado had a strip of canvas about 20 inches (50 cm) wide added to the left or right side, rendering each one almost square in format, presumably for decorative purposes. In 1991, in preparing for the great Ribera exhibition held at the Prado the following year, Mary Magdalene was cleaned and restored, and the signature and the date revealed; the added strip was removed from the right side of the original canvas. During the 1990´s, the tree other paintings were restored to their original dimensions. The X-radiograph of Mary Magdalene shows that Ribera painted with vigor and confidence, and made no changes in the composition as he worked. The brighter area around the Magdalene´s head, which sets it off against the dark background, was laid in late in the execution, and the top of the tree trunk was painted over this.

A workshop replica is in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao (oil on canvas, 77 x 58 3/4 in., 195.5 x 148 cm). It copies the format, color and composition of the Prado painting faithfully, but does not show the quality of Ribera´s own hand.

Finaldi, G, J. de Ribera 'Mary Magdalene' In. Jusepe de Ribera's Mary Magdalene in a new context, Meadows, Southern Methodist U., 2011, p.104-105, nº1