Titian's Magdalene that belonged to Christina of Sweden found. It will go to auction in May

A version of Titian Vecellio’s Penitent Magdalene, thought to be lost, has been found and will go up for auction at Dorotheum in Vienna on May 11, with an estimate of 1 to 1.5 million euros. The work was formerly part of the collections of Queen Christina of Sweden (1629-1689) and Duke Philip II of Orleans (1674-1723). The Dorotheum version, which will be included in the Old Master Paitings sale that, as mentioned, will be held on May 11, 2022, therefore has an illustrious provenance. It is possible, according to experts at the Austrian art house, that this painting was originally in the collection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, in Prague. From here the painting would have come to Sweden after the sack of Prague at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

What is certain is that this painting was in the large art collection of Christina of Sweden. At the age of 28, the queen abdicated and moved to Rome, bringing her Italian artwork and paintings-perhaps the Magdalene was among the works. In Rome, Christina became one of the greatest and most respected patrons of the arts. After her death, the painting experienced several changes of ownership: it was first in the collection of Cardinal Decio Azzolino in Rome, then came to his descendant Pompeo Azzolino, who sold it in 1697 to Livio Odescalchi, duke of Bracciano. From him the work passed by inheritance to Marquis Baldassare Erba Odescalchi who, in 1721, sold it to Pierre Crozat, who purchased it on behalf of the Regent of France during the reign of Louis XV, Philip II, Duke of Orléans. Subsequently, the work was purchased by Viscount Joseph Édouard Sébastien de Walckiers de Tronchiennes on behalf of his cousin, François Louis Jean-Joseph de Labord de Méréville, who took the work to London in 1792. There it was purchased by a consortium consisting of the third Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew George Granville Leveson-Gower, and the fifth Earl of Carlisle. Six years later it was sold for the sum of 350 guineas to a collector named John Maitland, and after his death in 1831 the work was purchased by the second Baron of Northwick, who retained possession until 1859. The work was purchased that year, for 66 guineas, by collector David Marks. Today the work is in a private collection: the owner is the grandson of the collector who bought it.

Until the early twentieth century, the work, which as we have seen was part of collections of important and illustrious people, experienced many passages in documents and literature (these were mainly publications about the collections in which Magdalene figured). Since the 1960s, the work has been considered lost by several scholars, the latest of whom, Paul Joannides, a specialist in Michelangelo’s drawings, considered it so in an article published in 2016 in the journal Artibus et Historiae and entitled An attempt to situate Titian’s paintings of the Penitent Magdalen. in Some Kind of Order. In ancient inventories (the first of which is by Christina of Sweden compiled in 1656) it is always considered the work of Titian. An engraving by Antoine Louis Romanet (1742-after 1810) is also known of the Magdalen.

It was to the aforementioned Paul Joannides that the Penitent Magdalene on sale at Dorotheum was recognized as the work once belonging to Christina of Sweden. Joannides’ attribution was later confirmed by Carlo Corsato, who contributed to research on the painting’s provenance. The Penitent Magdalene, the sale catalog states, “is the Titian subject that was most successful and most frequently commissioned. Its popularity among patrons lasted for more than forty years, during which time the artist subtly revisited and altered the image, producing many replicas, slightly different, of the same theme, yet retaining the essencea of the composition. The slightly turned pose, the upward gaze in prayer, and the cascade of long, wavy hair on Magdalene’s shoulders are reminiscent of a demure Venus, for a compositional scheme influenced by Giampietrino. In any case, it was Titian who fully explored the emotional and sensual potential of the image, granting Magdalene the popularity she enjoyed among her contemporaries and beyond.”

Titian produced two basic versions of the Magdalene: the one going up for auction in Vienna belongs to the second type, which became widespread from the 1650s onward. In the first type, the older one dating from the 1930s, Magdalene is nude and placed in a somber setting, characterized by the night sky, with the saint’s body occupying almost the entire surface. In the second type, Magdalene is less sensual, she is clothed, and the setting plays a more important role, since the mountainous landscape in which the saint is immersed is more easily observed: this could be a reference to Magdalene’s penance in the cave of Saint-Baume, where according to tradition she led a life of prayer.

The work by the Queen of Sweden could be dated to between 1550 and 1560 (probably in the second half of this decade) according to Dorotheum experts, based on comparisons with other similar works. Although it is well known that many of the Magdalenes are not fully autograph (some were made in collaboration with other artists in Titian’s atelier, others are workshop works without intervention by the master, not to mention the large number of copies), the one going up for auction at Dorotheum is by its quality, according to the scholars who have been dealing with the painting for the auction house, a work by the master. “This work,” concludes the presentation in the catalog, “is a significant image of the penitent Magdalene painted by Titian, in which the typically sensual, not to say erotic, characters employed in earlier versions are subordinated to the human emotion of the moment, and the saint’s tears engage the viewer in the narrative of her ardent devotion.”

Titian's Magdalene that belonged to Christina of Sweden found. It will go to auction in May

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