Pseudo-giampietrino B (milan, 3rd And 5th/6th Decades Of The 16th Century), The Penitent Magdalene

Pseudo-Giampietrino B (active in Milan between the third and fifth or sixth decades of the 16th century)

The Penitent Magdalene

Oil on canvas, 75.5 x 65 cm

With frame, 100 x 90 cm

The painting in question, depicting a Penitent Mary Magdalene, is part of the prolific tradition of Leonardo-inspired Milanese art from the first half of the 16th century and is a work by the so-called Pseudo-Giampietrino B, a distinct artistic figure who worked permanently within the workshop of Gian Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampietrino. This collaborator—singled out by modern critics to highlight stylistic variations from the master—reinterprets here an iconography of extraordinary commercial and devotional success, which found one of its absolute pinnacles in the prototype preserved at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. Giampietrino’s work is characterized by a systematic idealization of the female figure, filtering the legacy of Leonardo through an aesthetic of polished composure that finds its highest expression in the cycles dedicated to famous women from sacred and secular history. Through subjects such as Mary Magdalene, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Lucretia, the artist establishes a canon of beauty with sculptural features and a vibrant emotional charge, where the skillful use of sfumato lends the flesh a nearly enamel-like luminosity. These figures, portrayed with a grace that oscillates between devotional mysticism and tragic sensuality, attest to the painter’s ability to transform the Leonardo model into a distinctive stylistic hallmark, making his heroines timeless archetypes of the Lombard Renaissance. Compared to Giampietrino’s Bergamo version, where the saint’s face is immersed in a soft, melancholic sfumato, the work by Pseudo-Giampietrino B reveals a different sculptural sensibility that translates into an almost sculptural anatomical rendering, evident above all in the definition of the forearm and shoulder, which appear more solid and less atmospherically blended. The organization of Giampietrino’s workshop involved the systematic use of preparatory cartoons replicated with minimal variations to satisfy an aristocratic clientele eager for images of intense beauty and formal rigor; in this context, the Pseudo-Giampietrino B emerges as a highly skilled painter, capable of maintaining the elegance of the original model while adopting a more graphic style and drapery with almost metallic folds, as seen in the emerald-green cloak enveloping the figure. Characteristic features of his painting include a marked sense of three-dimensionality in the rendering of the figures’ anatomy, a more pronounced use of chiaroscuro, and a subtle tendency toward caricature in the facial features, balanced by his skill in rendering the golden hue of the hair with small touches of color. The painter created two other versions of the same composition of Mary Magdalene, derived from the aforementioned Carrara model: one in the Horne Museum in Florence and another in the collection of the Earls of Wemyss and March in Scotland.

Bibliography: C. Geddo, “La Madonna di Castel Vitoni by Giampietrino,” in *Academia Leonardi Vinci*, Volume VII, 1994, pp. 64–65