Painting on glass

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).