Pair of Slate Paintings: The Penitent Magdalene and Saint John the Baptist

Oil on slate. Presented here are two examples of oil painting on stone, a pictorial genre that between the 16th and 17th centuries had particular success in the Venetian Republic, in the form of oil painting on slate or touchstone. The choice of such a dark stone as a background is not only linked to practical reasons (the proximity of the mines of Brescia and Val Brembana), but, as our two works well demonstrate, the emergence of the figures from the dark background into the light also fully responds to the new needs of the painting of the time, which in the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, tended to express not only the idealized existential certainties of the High Renaissance, but also the anxieties and the opening to new phases, already tending with Tintoretto to a greater attention to the real and to the light contrasts, to then flow in an overwhelming way into the seventeenth-century researches strongly played precisely on the contrasting binomial light-shadow. The two works presented here, well within the production of the Venetian area of the first decades of the 17th century, propose two figures of saints, both hermits, placed on a dark, barely visible naturalistic background. The figure of Magdalene emerges from the darkness, supported to follow the curve of the stone support; she is depicted turned with an interrogative air towards the darkness, as in an attitude of listening, the left hand raised and the other resting on the excellently foreshortened 'memento mori'.Before her a scourge and the vase of ointment. Painted en pendant, Saint John the Baptist is represented as a young man, with a lamb at his feet, the processional cross in his hand with the banner 'ecce agnus dei', while with his right hand he draws from the water source, recalling the episode that will see him baptizing Jesus Christ. In both paintings, the figures stand out strongly and incisively thanks to the black that characterizes the slate plaque on which they are depicted. The two paintings, of oval format, are presented in black wooden frames, from the late 19th century. Product Condition: Product in good condition, has small signs of wear. We try to present the actual state as completely as possible with photos. If some details are not clear from the photos, the description is valid. Frame dimensions (cm): Height: 44 Width: 33.5 Depth: 3 Work dimensions (cm): Height: 37.5 Width: 26.5 ARARPI0233382