Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion: Titian’s Penitent Magdalen

Reading the saint’s nudity from a male, heterosexually-charged standpoint, several contemporary art historians have presupposed an overt eroticism in Titian’s Penitent Magdalen (ca. 1531) that has problematized understanding of its religious function. Recent scholarship concerning the painting’s commission, however, suggests that the work was originally intended for Vittoria Colonna, marchesa del Vasto. In this article I reconsider Titian’s sensuous nude in the context of its function as this woman’s private, devotional artwork. My discussion is predicated upon the assumption that depictions of flesh in a religious context had particular significance for female devotees because Christ’s mortal flesh, which guaranteed both his humanity and humankind’s salvation, was understood to be female. Depictions of sensuous female flesh could therefore function as a reminder of Christ’s own physical humanity and of women’s gender-specific relationship to it. For Vittoria Colonna, Titian’s fleshy Magdalen would have functioned as a uniquely appropriate devotional tool.