Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georges de la Tour
French; 17th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
93%
The Penitent Magdalen. c1640. Oil on canvas
De la Tour's power is in the tension between the hardness of his geometry and the intangibility of his light. Here, Mary is a triangle stacked on a trapezoid and darkling, her head turned deep into the scene towards a flame and its reflection in a mirror. (The mirror, a black square holding a bit of saving light, is a metonym for the painting as an object and an experience.) Every one of her aspects, from the teacup-handle fingers to the parallelogram of a forearm to her helmet of hard hair, is solid and sharply, strangely limned. But the candle flickers doubt onto the thingness of all of these things. What's that finger with a gleam across it, that wrist with a bright spot of white? By way of the light even Mary's room is an involution, indiscernibly inside of itself. The things in this painting both are and aren't in equal measure. (2023)