perpetually presents itself; and, well or ill executed, will in general be found to comprise the following scenes:— 1. Her conversion at the feet of the Saviour. 2. Christ entertained in the house of Martha: Mary sits at his feet to hear his words. 3. The raising of Lazarus. 4. Mary Magdalene and her companions embark in a vessel without sails, oars, or rudder. 5. Steered by an angel, they land at Marseilles. 6. Mary Magdalene preaches to the people. 7. The miracle of the mother and child. 8. The penance of the Magdalene in a desert cave. 9. She is carried up in the arms of angels. 10. She receives the sacraments from the hands of an angel or from St. Maximin. 11. She dies, and angels bear her spirit to heaven.1 The subjects vary of course in number and in treatment, but, with some attention to the foregoing legend, they will easily be understood and discriminated. Such a series was painted by Giotto in the Chapel of the Bargello at Florence (where the portrait of Dante was lately discovered), but they are nearly obliterated; the miracle of the mother and child is, however, to be distinguished on the left near the entrance. The treatment of the whole has been imitated by Taddeo Gaddi in the Rinuccini Chapel at Florence, and by Giovanni da Milano and Giottino in the Chapel of the Magdalene at Assisi; on the windows of the Cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges; and in a series of bas-reliefs round the There is a fine series of frescoes from the life of Mary Magdalene by Gaudenzio Ferrari, in the church of St. Cristoforo at Vercelli. 1. Mary and Martha are seated, with a crowd of others, listening to Christ, who is preaching in a pulpit. Martha is veiled and thoughtful: Mary, richly dressed, looks up eagerly.-Half destroyed. 2. Mary anoints the feet of the Saviour: she lays her head down on his foot with a tender humiliation: in the background the Maries at the sepulchre and the Noli me tangere. This also in great part ruined. 3. The legend of the Prince of Provence and his wife, who are kneeling before Lazarus and Mary. Martha is to the left, and Marcella behind. In the background are the various scenes of the legend:-the embarkation; the scene on the island; the arrival at Jerusalem; the return to Marseilles with the child. This is one of the best preserved, and the heads are remarkably fine. 4. Mary Magdalene sustained by angels, her feet resting between the wings of one of them, is borne upwards. All the upper part of the figure is destroyed. In the background are the last communion and burial of the Magdalene. I saw these frescoes in October 1855. They suffered greatly from the siege in 1638, when several bombs shattered this part of the wall, and will soon cease to exist. They are engraved in their present state in Pianazzi's “Opere di Gaudenzio Ferrari," No. 19. porch of the Certosa of Pavia, executed in the classical style of the sixteenth century. On reviewing generally the infinite variety which has been given to these favourite subjects, the life and penance of the Magdalene, I must end where I began ;-in how few instances has the result been satisfactory to mind or heart, or soul or sense! Many have well represented the particular situation, the appropriate sentiment, the sorrow, the hope, the devotion: but who has given us the character? A noble creature, with strong sympathies, and a strong will, with powerful faculties of every kind, working for good or evil- such a woman Mary Magdalene must have been, even in her humiliation; and the feeble, girlish, commonplace, and even vulgar women who appear to have been usually selected as models by the artists, turned into Magdalenes by throwing up their eyes and letting down their hair, ill represent the enthusiastic convert or the majestic patroness. I must not quit the subject of the Magdalene without some allusion to those wild legends which suppose a tender attachment (but of course wholly pure and Platonic) to have existed between her and St. John the Evangelist. In the enthusiasm which Mary Magdalene excited in the thirteenth century, no supposition that tended to exalt her was deemed too extravagant: some of her panegyrists go so far as to insist that the marriage at Cana, which our Saviour and his mother honoured by their presence, was the marriage of St. John with the Magdalene ; and that Christ repaired to the wedding-feast on purpose to prevent the accomplishment of the marriage, having destined both to a state of greater perfection. This fable was never accepted by the Church; and among the works of art consecrated to religious purposes I have never met with any which placed St. John and the Magdalene in particular Bayle, Dict. Hist.; Molanus, lib. iv., de Hist. Sacrar. S. Mag., cap. xx. p. 428.; Thomasium, prefat. 78. The authority usually cited is Abdius, a writer who pretended to have lived in the first century, and whom Bayle styles "the most impudent of legendary impostors." relation to each other, except when they are seen together at the foot of the cross, or lamenting with the Virgin over the body of the Saviour: but such was the popularity of these extraordinary legends towards the end of the thirteenth and in the beginning of the fourteenth century, that I think it possible such may exist, and, for want of this key, may appear hopelessly enigmatical. In a series of eight subjects which exhibit the life of St. John prefixed to a copy of the Revelations', there is one which I think admits of this interpretation. The scene is the interior of a splendid building sustained by pillars. St. John is baptizing a beautiful woman, who is sitting in a tub; she has long golden hair. On the outside of the building seven men are endeavouring to see what is going forward: one peeps through the key-hole; one has thrown himself flat on the ground, and has his eye to an aperture; a third, mounted on the shoulders of another, is trying to look in at a window; a fifth, who cannot get near enough, tears his hair in an agony of impatience; and another is bawling into the ear of a deaf and blind comrade a description of what he has The execution is French, of the fourteenth century; the taste, it will be said, is also French; the figures are drawn with a pen and slightly tinted the design is incorrect; but the vivacity of gesture and expression, though verging on caricature, is so true, and so comically dramatic, and the whole composition so absurd, that it is impossible to look at it without a smile. seen. ST. MARTHA. Ital. Santa Marta, Vergine, Albergatrice di Christo. Patroness of cooks and housewives. Fr. Sainte Marthe, la Travailleuse. MARTHA has shared in the veneration paid to her sister. The important part assigned to her in the history of Mary has already been adverted to; she is always represented as the instrument through whom Mary was converted, the one who led her first to the feet of the Saviour. "Which thing," says the story, "should not be accounted as the lcast Paris Bibliothèque du Roi, MS. 7013, fourteenth century. |