Painting on glass
May one see it?
Yes, receiving visitors
London, United Kingdom
RoomEurope 1600-1815, Room 5, The Friends of the V&A Gallery
On public display.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the painting
This brilliant jewel-like image depicts the conversion of Mary Magdalen, a medieval legend painted by a number of artists in the seventeenth century, including Caravaggio, Rubens and Artemisia Gentileschi. The saint's eyes are raised in ecstasy toward the light which streams in from the left; the billowing drapery and discarded jewels suggesting sudden physical movement. Exceptionally in an image of the Magdalen there are two mirrors: one by the saint's head, catching the divine illumination and representing self-knowledge and wisdom, and a second, cracked mirror lying on the floor amid the discarded jewels in an allusion to the perils of vanity and self-deception. The sun as symbolic of spiritual insight is conflated in this object with references to Louis XIV as Roi Soleil, making what appears to be an image of divine revelation into something more complex. It may be that the figure of the saint is also intended as an allegorical portrait of one of the king's mistresses (a popular seventeenth-century conceit).
Read on
Intended for private devotion, this glittering image places the saint in an unusually sumptuous interior and was probably intended to be hung in a similar setting. The reflective qualities of glass, combined with the visual appeal of precious stones, made reverse painted glass popular for small devotional objects. Historically, however, such techniques have tended to be viewed as an inferior type of enamelling, hence the original cataloguing of this object as a ceramic in 1879.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- 146-1879
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Image: Victoria and Albert Museum — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
