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Abstract
Savoldo's admirable half-length Magdalene (first version dated ca. 1524) has been consistently regarded as a secularized, if mysteriously enticing, image of the saint. Here it is interpreted as a novel transformation of the Renaissance devotional image in light of John 20:11-18, and of narrative and formal developments in Italian painting of half-length format from the period 1475-1505. The formal aspect receives an especially close analysis: Savoldo's approach to pictorial illusion can be shown to embody a poetic of the fictive that is dependent on the rhetorical model of Alberti, but ultimately based on widespread trecento formulations about poetry's relation to painting.
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Mary Pardo
Mary Pardo received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the literature on the figurative arts of the Italian Renaissance, and she is currently revising an English translation and commentary of Paolo Pino's Dialogo di pittura [Department of Art, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3405]