Palma Giovane was one of the leading artists active in Venice at the turn of the century, his career continuing well into the second quarter of the century following. He was, moreover, among the most prolific draftsmen of the period. His drawing style reveals a number of important, mostly Venetian influences, ranging from Titian (c. 1485-1576) and Domenico Campagnola (1500-1564), to Tintoretto (1519-1594) and Veronese (1528-1588). Some influence of the technique of the Roman Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566) is also sometimes detectable. Palma Giovane´s favorite medium was pen and wash, of which this is a good example.

The present, finished compositional study of a Magdalen shows the saint seated on a rock in the desert. According to legend, she lived in retreat in a grotto at Saint-Baume in France. Her normal attribute, an ointment jar, which was filled with the unguent with which she anointed Christ´s feet, is absent. Nevertheless, unmistakably hers is the long hair that falls down as far as her waist and her wistful, penitential glance to the heavens. The Prado drawing shares a number of compositional features with Palma Giovane´s canvas of the Penitent Magdalen Kneeling in the Desert in the Accademia Carrara at Bergamo (inv. no. 414/990; Ivanoff and Zampetti, 1980, p. 529, no. 10, and p. 671, fig. 2), in which the figure of the saint is likewise semi-nude, with long, flowing hair and looks upwards to the right at the heavens. Besides showing the figure kneeling on the ground, the Bergamo picture has other differences, however, including the presence of a book and a skull on the top of the rock at the Magdalen´s side and a crucifix propped up in the top left. The Bergamo picture is datable to the painter´s mature period, and it is not impossible that the Prado drawing came into being as an off-shoot from this pictorial idea.

Although self-evident, it is worth calling attention all the same to Palma Giovane´s none-too-subtle hints in the Prado drawing at Titian´s splendid, but mostly secular, female nudes. Among these is the magnificent Venus Rising from the Sea in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, painted in c.1520-1525, one of the earlier master´s great mythological paintings, in which the goddess wrings her long soaking hair as she emerges from the deep. Palma Giovane´s treatment of his youthful, nude female saint seems unimaginable without this ideal of female beauty first met with in Titian´s paintings (Text drawn from Turner, N.: From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci. A century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Art Services International-Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 150).