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[Illustration: _Alinari_

ST. MARY MAGDALEN

BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote: The Magdalen and similar Statues.]

We have now to consider a group of rugged statues differing in date
but animated by the same motive, the Magdalen in Florence and three
statues of St. John the Baptist in Siena, Venice, and Berlin. Of
these, the Magdalen in the Baptistery at Florence is the most typical
and the most uncompromising. She stands upright, a mass of tattered
rags, haggard, emaciated, almost toothless. Her matted hair falls down
in thick knots; all feminine softness has gone from the limbs, and
nothing but the drawn muscles remain. It is a thin wasted form,
piteous in expression, painful in all its ascetic excess. The Magdalen
has, of course, been the subject of hostile criticism. It gives a
shock, it inspires horror: it is an outrage on every well-clothed and
prosperous sinner.[178] In point of fact, Donatello's summary method
of carving the wood has given a harshness and asperity to features
which in themselves are not displeasing. In a dimmed light, or looking
with unfocused eyes on the reproduction, it is clear that the
structural lines of the face were once well favoured. But from the
beginning the Magdalen was a work which made a profound impression,
and its popularity is measured by the number of statues of a like
nature. Charles VIII. wanted to buy it in 1498, but the Florentines
thought it priceless and hid it away. Two years later they had the
bronze diadem added by Jacopo Sogliani.[179] Finally, at a period when
this type of sculpture with all its appeal to the traditions of the
Thebaid, was least likely to have been acceptable in art or exemplar,
the statue was placed in a niche above an altar erected on purpose for
its reception, where an inscription testifies to the regard in which
it was then held.[180] This Magdalen is didactic in purpose. Donatello
seems to have given less attention to the modelling, subtle as it is,
than to the concentration of the one absorbing lesson which was to be
conveyed to the spectator. His object was to show repentance, abject
unqualified remorse; purified by suffering, refined by bodily
hardship, and sustained by the "sun of discipline and virtue." There
is no luxury in this Magdalen, but she may have contributed to the
reaction when Pompeo Battoni and the like transformed her into an
opulent personage, dressed in purple, who reclines