e, made a superb
copy for the Offices, I believe.

This Magdalen of Correggio's, "the least converted of sinners and the
most adorable of penitents," is she really, historically and
liturgically the Magdalen of the House of Bethany, of the grotto de la
Sainte-Baume in Provence? No. She recalls rather "_cette dame de
marque_" who was evoked in the Seventeenth Century by the Carmelite
Father Pierre de Saint-Louis in his sublime poem of accomplished
burlesque; and does not the following verse hum in your ear:

_"Levres dont l'incarnat faisant voir a la fois
Un rosier sans epine, un chapelet sans croix,"_

while the sinner

_" ... s'occupe a punir le forfait
De son temps preterit qui ne fut qu'imparfait"?_

This evidently is not at all the art of the Middle Ages, nor its saints,
whose vestment was sackcloth and whose body was a mere lay figure for a
soul devoted entirely to purity, to simplicity, to mysticism, and to the
other world. In the Sixteenth Century, however, people took the
sackcloth from the saints and dressed them in flesh. Then was produced a
kind of revival of paganism, of naturalism, of life; and religious art,
in its flesh and colouring, no longer created anything but an Olympus of
beautiful maidens, or, at least, noble goddesses. Correggio's Magdalen
belongs to this artistic cycle and the painter executed it in the
noonday splendour of those qualities, the dawn of which glows in Parma
at St. Paul's. Correggio is not a mystic, he is a voluptuous naturalist,
and from him to the realist Caravaggio, "the grinder of flesh," and the
exuberant Rubens, who gave much study to Correggio, the distance is not
very great and the decline is fatal. But, in the meantime, where shall
we find more grace, or seductiveness--under this conversion complicated
with memories--than in Correggio's Magdalen?

In hagiographal literature we find a work of similar tone and charm:
_Marie Madeleine_, by P. Lacordaire, an exquisite little book written
with tenderness and piety, which deliciously calls up before us the
Magdalen of repentance and love, "the loving woman accustomed to the
delights of contemplation and needing only to see in her heart him whom
in other days she saw under the transparent veil of mortal flesh."

It must be confessed that Correggio was constantly preoccupied with
_charm_ and with that skilful coquetry that sports with every grace.
This is a subtlety of purely personal qualities; but let