Nux

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The Penitent Magdalen ("Magdalen of Night Light"): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), c. 1640 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)



The Penitent Magdalen ("Magdalen of Night Light") (detail): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), c. 1640 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

The Penitent Magdalen ("Magdalen with the Smoking Flame"): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), 1640-1645 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Little Prince basks serene
As an Egyptian god on his barge
On the green cushion, gently breathing

While in his sleep mouselike plays the mind
With its empty toys less real
Than the large drops of rain the nightwind tosses

The night, dark as the flooding of the Nile
The brain, that clouded crystal ball
Blurry with drowned thoughts --

A dream of words, sub noctis
Flowing from magic into error, from aether into terra --
On the upriver stream toward morning

The Penitent Magdalen ("Magdalen at the Mirror with Two Flames"): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), 1635-1640 (Wrightsman Collection / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)



The Penitent Magdalen ("Magdalen at the Mirror with Two Flames") (detail): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), 1635-1640 (Wrightsman Collection / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)



The Penitent Magdalen at the Mirror ("Fabius Magdalen"): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), 1635-1640 (Fabius Collection / National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)



Penitent Magdalen [?] ("Woman Catching Fleas"): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), c. 1635 (Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy)



Penitent Magdalen [?] ("Woman Catching Fleas") (detail): Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), c. 1635 (Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy)

[La Tour's] later work discards the rowdy group scene in favour of individual figures who sit alone by candlelight, in states of heightened privacy and inwardness. In one extraordinary case, known as 'The Flea Catcher', a woman, half-undressed, inspects her body for parasites -- in principle, a very low-life subject indeed, but handled by La Tour so as to suggest a quite different kind of process, a sombre self-assessment, an examination of conscience, a renunciation of the world's show. La Tour's various representations of Mary Magdalene rework the nocturne in the direction of self-scrutiny and penitence; the candle sits next to a skull, and it is the skull, not her own beauty, that the saint pensively considers in the mirror. La Tour exploits to the full the capacity of candlelight to spirit away the world that lies outside its own bright centre, and swallow it up in darkness; it is as though nothing exists beyond the figure's own solitude.

-- Norman Bryson