Famous Italian painter Caravaggio was also famously short-tempered. In 1606, he got in a fight with a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni – accounts vary on whether it was over a tennis match or a prostitute – and killed him. Caravaggio, then 34 years old, had to leave town in a rush. But just after this fateful brawl, letters from this period suggest, Caravaggio painted Mary Magdalene – one of Jesus’ disciples who went into isolation after his crucifixion and is said to have been the first to see him after he resurrected on Easter Sunday – in a moment of religious ecstasy.
With the painter on the run, it seems, the painting went out of mind and out of circulation – that is, till the 2010s when researchers started talking about it again and looking for it. In 2014, Caravaggio expert and art historian Mina Gregori, now 101 years old, said she’d found the original in a private collection in Europe – arguing that you can see the “hand of the master” in everything from the play of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) to the incline of Magdalene’s body, her interlaced fingers and the cross and crown of thorns to the left of the painting.
To be sure, there still exist copies of the painting, which also inspired other works – including Artemisia’s ‘Magdalene in Ecstasy’, painted sometime between 1620 and 1625, which is now famous in its own right. In 2018, an exhibition in Europe exhibited what is now called the Gregori version and another version of the same painting – dividing art historians and scholars of Italian Baroque on the authenticity of either and over what to make of this juxtaposition.
Where to see 'Magdalene in Ecstasy' in India
Gregori’s version of ‘Magdalene in Ecstasy’ is now on show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Saket, south Delhi. The Italian masters have inspired generations of Indian artists. Yet, this is the first time a Caravaggio painting has travelled to India – KNMA and the Cultural Centre of the Italian Embassy in India collaborated to make this happen.
At KNMA, a separate “shrine” has been built from board and fresh paint and heavy curtains for the ‘Magdalene’. Visitors queue up for a two-minute viewing on opening day, April 17. As the curtains part for your turn, you enter a darkened room. The only source of light is trained on ‘Magdalene’, her body tilted and her head thrown back in ecstasy. Her hands seem to be folded in prayer and a tear escapes her barely open eyes.
Religious ecstasy is not a foreign concept to us in India. We have the legacy of saints like Meera Bai and an entire tradition of Bhakti saints who professed love for their god. This kind of ecstasy, an out of body experience, an immersion so deep that it leaves you oblivious to everything and everyone else, resonates then at some deep level.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was an acknowledged master of the play of light and shadow or chiaroscuro. In ‘Magdalene’, this play gives the work an intensely realistic, cinematic quality. Magdalene is captured in a moment of rapture here, paying no mind to her dishevelled dress or hair. Her lips are parted. And because her head is tilted as far back as it can go, the tear that escapes from her left eye rolls down towards her ear.
Whether art historians agree that this is the original Caravaggio or not, the painter’s skill here is unmissable. The colour of the skin, her darkened lower lip – almost green compared with the bud-pink of the upper lip exposed to the light, the shadow over her nose, her fingers in the light in some places and in relative darkness in others, her throat and shoulder catching the light directly, the whole tilt of her body lends it drama. The way her clothes are painted, too, offers cues. In a brochure, Mina Gregori writes that brush strokes, long and broad – and turning at the ends – for the red cloak juxtaposed with finer details on the blouse and hair are also typical Caravaggio.
At the KNMA launch, Italian ambassador to India and Nepal Antonio Bartoli mentioned a couple of things worth repeating here. First, in his short life of 38 years, Caravaggio managed to get into trouble with the law a lot, but his patrons continued to be Cardinals and other Church officials. Second, Caravaggio was painting in the post-Renaissance period for these patrons, a time when the Church was looking for a bit of a boost in public sentiment. Caravaggio’s paintings of saints and figures from the Bible served their purpose well. Third, although Caravaggio's subjects were saints and Biblical themes, his models were often beggars and destitutes around the city, whom he painted in contemporary dress.
Original or not, it’s no small feat that roughly 400 years after this work was painted, it translates Mary Magdalene’s ecstasy – her absorption, her immersion in her god, to an extent where it is a physical experience – for viewers thousands of miles from where it was painted.
'Magdalene in Ecstasy' is on view at KNMA Saket from 18 April-18 May 2025 (except Mondays and holidays).
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