The Headless Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi

I’m charmed by this fragment of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Mary Magdalene that’s up for auction later this month.

For many years it was in a private collection in Germany where it lay rolled up in a cellar. The head of the saint had been cut out of the canvas, under circumstances that remain unclear, in an incident most probably linked to the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin.

Like the empty picture frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the rectangular hole in the painting invites the viewer to imagine what became of its former contents. Where is Magdalene’s head & shoulders now? Did it get framed as its own painting? Is it still hanging in someone’s house or tucked away in someone’s attic? Will it be reunited with the rest of the painting someday?

Btw, this painting is a copy of another of Gentileschi’s previous works, which hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. There are some differences between the two paintings, but at least we know what the area inside that hole looks like, mostly.

• art
• Artemisia Gentileschi