page_title: The Magdalen Reading
section_title: Altarpiece fragment
hierarchical_section_title: The Magdalen Reading / Altarpiece fragment
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph from the 1930s of The Magdalen Reading before it was cleaned.Français&#160;: Photographie des années 1930 de la Marie-Madeleine lisant avant que le tableau ne soit nettoyé.
context_page_description: The Magdalen Reading is one of three surviving fragments of a large mid-15th-century oil-on-panel altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. The panel, originally oak, was completed some time between 1435 and 1438 and has been in the National Gallery, London since 1860. It shows a woman with the pale skin, high cheek bones and oval eyelids typical of the idealised portraits of noble women of the period. She is identifiable as the Magdalen from the jar of ointment placed in the foreground, which is her traditional attribute in Christian art. She is presented as completely absorbed in her reading, a model of the contemplative life, repentant and absolved of past sins. In Catholic tradition the Magdalen was conflated with both Mary of Bethany who anointed the feet of Jesus with oil and the unnamed "sinner" of Luke 7:36–50. Iconography of the Magdalen commonly shows her with a book, in a moment of reflection, in tears, or with eyes averted.
  The background of the painting had been overpainted with a thick layer of brown paint.
context_section_description: Virgin and Child with Saints, a drawing in Stockholm's Nationalmuseum, is believed to be a study of a portion of the original altarpiece by a follower of van der Weyden, who possibly may have been the Master of the Coburger Rundblätter. The drawing has a loosely sketched background and shows, from left to right: an unidentified bishop saint with mitre and crosier making a blessing gesture; a narrow gap with a few wavy vertical lines suggesting a start at the outline of a further kneeling figure; a barefoot bearded figure in a rough robe identified as Saint John the Baptist; a seated Virgin holding on her lap the Christ Child who leans to the right, looking at a book; and holding the book, a kneeling beardless male identified as John the Evangelist. The drawing stops at the end of John's robe, at about the point on the London panel where Joseph's walking stick meets John and the Magdalene's robes. This suggests that the Magdalene panel was the first to be cut from the larger work.
  At an unknown point before 1811, the original altarpiece was broken into at least three pieces, possibly due to damage, although The Magdalen fragment is in good condition. The black overpaint was likely added after the early 17th century when Netherlandish painting had fallen from favour and was unfashionable. Campbell believes that after the removal of the background detail "it looked sufficiently like a genre piece to hang in a well-known collection of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings". From the size of three surviving panels in relation to the drawing, it is estimated that the original was at least 1 m high by 1.5 m wide; the bishop and the Magdalene seem to clearly mark the horizontal extremities, but the extent of the picture above and below the surviving elements and the drawing cannot be judged. This size is comparable with smaller altarpieces of the period. The background was overpainted with a thick layer of black/brown pigment until it was cleaned in 1955; it was only after the layer's removal that it was linked to the upper body and head of Joseph from the Lisbon piece. These two works were not recorded in inventory until 1907, when they appear in the collection of Léo Lardus in Suresnes, France.
  The London panel shows much of the clothing of two other figures from the original altarpiece. To the left of the Magdalene is the red robe of what appears to be a kneeling figure. The figure and robe, and less precisely the background, match a kneeling Saint John the Evangelist. Behind the Magdalen is a standing figure in blue and red robes, with linear rosary beads in one hand and a walking stick in the other. A panel at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon shows the head of a figure believed to be the Saint Joseph; the background and clothes match with those of the figure behind the Magdalen on the London panel.
  There is a further small panel in Lisbon of a female head, richly or royally dressed, which first appeared in 1907 with the Joseph panel when it was recorded in the inventory of Leo Nardus at Suresnes. The figure may represent Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and from both the angle of her cloth and the fact that the river behind her would be parallel to that in the exterior of the London panel it can be assumed that she was kneeling. In the Stockholm drawing she is omitted, or only traces of her dress shown. The Joseph panel has a sliver of a view through a window to an exterior scene; if the other female is presumed to be kneeling, the trees above the waterway aligns with those in the London panel.  Some art historians, including Martin Davies and John Ward, have been slow to allow the Catherine panel as part of the altarpiece, though it is undoubtedly by van der Weyden or a near-contemporary follower. Evidence against this link includes the fact that the moulding of the window to the left of the Gulbenkian female saint is plain, while that next to Saint Joseph is chamfered. Such an inconsistency in a single van der Weyden work is unusual. The panels are of equal thickness (1.3 cm) and of near-identical size; the Saint Cathe
caption: Cropped 1930s black and white photograph of the panel before it was cleaned of the overpaint.[27] The reasons for the overpainting and the breaking up of the altarpiece are unknown.
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