Penitent Magdalene

Inside the Cathedral’s adjoining museum, there is a bony, emaciated, uncharacteristically weird wooden sculpture that frequently triggers deep physical discomfort in tourists, utterly shattering everyone’s traditional understanding of “divine aesthetic beauty.”

Using just a completely ordinary block of white poplar wood, Donatello carved out a fiercely weathered and battered Mary Magdalene with brutal realism. Stripped entirely of the rosy, soft beauty typically seen in standard religious art, she looks exactly like a shriveled, emaciated street beggar. Her wildly messy, matted, straw-like hair completely engulfs her skeletal body; her terrifyingly sunken eye sockets, jutting cheekbones, and slightly parted, cracked lips vividly exhaust the profound sense of physical decay brought on by extreme physical torment.

In the folklore of the time, this Mary Magdalene was popularly associated as a renowned, repentant prostitute. After hitting rock bottom and being saved by Jesus from out of social scorn, she fled completely alone into the savage desert to undergo thirty years of brutal fasting and intense ascetic penance just to wash away the sins of the flesh.

Looking intently at her terrifyingly thin, claw-like hands just pausing before joining in prayer, can you pierce past that uncomfortable, rotting shell of flesh to actually feel the fiercely pure and incredibly powerful soul vibrating inside?

Donatello, in his advanced old age, grew thoroughly sick and tired of the glossy, superficially beautiful classical aesthetics that defined early Renaissance pursuits. While the artists around him were frantically busy carving perfectly proportioned muscular Davids and voluptuous Venuses, a severely ill Donatello—who was only one step away from his own grave—resolutely pivoted toward exploring the absolute darkest, most extreme spiritual agonies of human existence.