She’s been called by many names over the years.  “The Grieving Marchioness.”  “The Unrepentant Magdalene.”  “The Mona Lisa of Rome”—or, cheekily, the “Roma Lisa.”  Whatever her title, the painting known colloquially as the Attavanti Maddalena is front and center in a new exhibit at the Villa Medici in Rome, highlighting revelations within the past decade as to her probable history.

 

The very origins of the Attavanti Maddalena are the stuff of mystery.  What we know for certain is that, beginning around 1800, the painting sat for decades in the private chapel of the Marquesses Attavanti within the Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle.  For years, visitors stepping into the vast silence of the basilica from the noisy bustle of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II—the thoroughfare that traverses Rome’s historic city center—were consistently struck by the painting, staring intense and poised through the grille of the chapel just to the left of the entrance.  After much discussion, and with the permission of the Attavanti family, the painting was removed from Sant’Andrea in the mid-1960s and has since been exhibited throughout Italy, although it remains the Attavanti family’s private property.

 

Yet the painting’s inception and execution have been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate ever since the painting first took hold of the public imagination.  The work is unsigned—perhaps a function of the commonly accepted hypothesis that the painting is unfinished—and no documentation of its commission has been found in the archives of Sant’Andrea.  For many years, it was assumed to have been the work of Francesco Brunino, although skepticism has always abounded around this assertion, given the mismatch between the painting’s startling realism and Brunino’s heightened neoclassicism circa the early 1800s.

 

Then a letter emerged that shook the art world.  Written in Rome in May 1800, and rediscovered in Paris in August 2011, the letter fills in several major gaps in the circumstances of the Attavanti Madonna’s creation, and also reveals the identity of its probable creator.  The recipient was a now-forgotten painter in the atelier of the great master Jacques-Louis David; the sender was the Franco-Roman painter Mario Cavaradossi, also of David’s atelier.  Cavaradossi’s letter recounts in carefully unspecific language the tenor of life in Rome during its reactionary period of Neapolitan occupation after the fall of the French-supported Roman Republic of 1798, ending with the remark: “You’ll laugh at me, but the atmosphere has gotten so tense that I’ve agreed to paint a Madeleine for a local church, completely gratis, to court the favorable opinion of a royalist marquis.  I might as well make myself as popular as I can, while I’m still here!”  (The lack of expense to the church might account for the shoddy record-keeping, as the arrangement may have been somewhat informal on both sides.)

 

In retrospect, it seems impossible that Cavaradossi was not more seriously considered as the painter of the Attavanti Maddalena before the discovery of his letter.  An outspoken Bonapartist during and even after the days of the Roman Republic, Cavaradossi was a friend of Cesare Angelotti, a Consul of that short-lived government.  Meanwhile, Angelotti’s sister, Giulia, was the Marchioness Attavanti, and the Attavanti Maddalena is undoubtedly a painting modeled after her likeness, considering its striking similarity to other contemporaneous portraits of the notably beautiful noblewoman.  Given the tragic spiral of political events that drew these three figures inexorably together over the course of one summer day in Rome, the fact that the Marchioness Attavanti was willing to model for Cavaradossi’s unconventional Mary Magdalene is utterly unsurprising.  (For those not already familiar with Cavaradossi’s personal history, the exhibit explains the shocking story so vividly that it would be a shame to spoil anything in advance.  Suffice to say that it is quite fitting that the gallery hosting this exhibit is the villa bought by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803 to host the French Academy in Rome, seated in the hills overlooking the Eternal City.)

 

Cavaradossi—an avowed and somewhat notorious atheist—famously refused to paint religious themes after a certain point in his career, and this was the primary reason over the years for dismissing his possible creation of the Attavanti Maddalena.  But this depiction of the sinner-turned-saint is, in many senses, anything but religious.  Critics have long commented on the absence of any typical iconography in the painting, such as the jar of ointment with which Mary Magdalene anointed Christ’s feet.  The one recognizable element is the woman’s long, flowing blonde hair—hair which, in the early Renaissance, often was depicted as long and exuberant enough to wrap fully around the saint’s body in lieu of clothes.  The Attavanti Maddalena is attired in more than her locks, but the manner in which she is posed suggests otherwise to any viewer familiar with one of the most famous works of the later Italian Renaissance, for Cavaradossi’s Magdalene resembles nothing so much as the beautiful nude in Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus: the classical contrapposto stance, the graceful placement of the hands, the elegant tilt of the head, and of course the unruly mane of golden tresses blown into tendril-like tangles by an unseen wind.

 

Cavaradossi was known amongst his friends and enemies alike for a wicked sense of humor and a tendency to push at boundaries in the most polite manner possible.  In light of some of his other more tongue-in-cheek works on display at the Louvre—such as a painting of a cat that many insist is actually a cutting depiction of Pope Pius VI—the subtle weaving of a luscious pagan goddess into the very fabric of a Catholic icon seems entirely in keeping with Cavaradossi’s antics.  Understandably, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence were unwilling to lend the Villa Medici one of their most famous works for the duration of this exhibit, but it appears Cavaradossi must have had access to the original when it was on display at the Villa di Castello, for the exhibit presents two superb quarter-sized renditions of both The Birth of Venus and La Primavera, lovingly recreated in oils by Cavaradossi’s own hand and indicating the importance of both works to his personal development as a painter.

 

Botticelli’s influence looms large over the Attavanti Maddalena, but the frequent comparisons to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece are equally apt.  Botticelli’s Venus is ethereal in her detachment, her distant gaze gently unfocused as she turns downwards those eyes shaped like tapered almonds, set slightly misaligned from one another in Botticelli’s somewhat uncanny signature style.  Cavaradossi’s Magdalene, by contrast, engages her viewer as directly and unflinchingly and enigmatically as does the Mona Lisa.  Unlike da Vinci’s subtle smiler, though, Cavaradossi’s stoic saint turns an expression of exquisitely concealed pain towards the viewer.  The telltale signs of her grief are understated, reduced to the emphasized shadow at her temple signifying a clenched jaw, the fact that several fingernails of the left hand are chewed close with anxiety.  And yet they render her all the more human for their restraint, as if this is a Magdalene who knows she lives in the public eye and must retain some dignity in spite of her pain.  It is this dichotomy between saintly tolerance and suppressed human agony that gives the Attavanti Maddalena her timeless appeal, the allure that has arrested countless casual viewers and has provided fodder for endless art history dissertations and cheap tourist trinkets alike.

 

Despite its seeming completion, many art historians believe the Attavanti Maddalena to be an unfinished work—a hypothesis that squares cleanly with the assumption that Cavaradossi was forced by fate and circumstance to abandon it midstream.  A close inspection of the background does indicate penciling below the first layer of paint, suggesting that Cavaradossi had plans to embellish the painting’s background further.  But while some art critics have proposed that the typical iconographic elements of a Mary Magdalene would have been added subsequently, they may be disappointed: Both Cavaradossi’s penciling and his overall attitude towards religious art indicate that this Magdalene was meant to be as secular as possible, more an allegory for graceful endurance than a depiction of any particular saint.

 

But to place too narrow a focus on the Attavanti Maddalena would do a disservice to the rest of this thoughtfully curated exhibit, which is designed to demonstrate how comfortably the painting fits into Cavaradossi’s overall oeuvre, and which displays works of equal mastery and beauty.  The complement to the exhibit’s centerpiece is an exquisite series of five oil paintings of Cavaradossi’s lover, the celebrated opera singer Floria Tosca, executed over the year the artists spent together in Rome, as well as numerous chalk and pastel sketches of the diva.  Intimate and animated, the depictions of the soprano in unguarded moments bring to life the woman Cavaradossi loved, in all her vivacity and passions and imperfections and eccentricities.  Unlike the stern, close-lipped formal portraits of the era, Cavaradossi’s paintings capture his subject mid-laugh or sitting in contemplation, as immediate and realistic as a photograph, even in more whimsical depictions such as Floria Tosca as the Goddess Minerva (Study for the Teatro Argentina).  Although utterly unlike the Attavanti Maddalena in tone and composition, the kinship between the allegorical saint and these portraits is undeniable, as the works of a young idealist seeking to depict the world around him with a deeply humanist commitment to both beauty and truth.

 

Through these portraits of Floria Tosca, we can also trace Cavaradossi’s gradual development as a painter.  His earlier works in Paris, grounded in subjects from antiquity like the dutiful neoclassicist he was, are constrained by the legacy of his infamous master, displaying impeccable technique that mimics the smoothness and grandeur of David’s paintings of Bonaparte.  In Rome, however, Cavaradossi’s style becomes looser, his brushstrokes less precise, as he paints the people and monuments around him with the utmost attention paid to the interplay of light and shadow, perhaps inspired by the paintings of Tintoretto and Caravaggio around him in Italy.  In this livelier brushwork, Cavaradossi foreshadows the romanticism of Eugène Delacroix, and one can only imagine how his work might have developed, had he lived to see the Impressionists.

 

In a letter dated only a few days before his death, Cavaradossi wrote, “If I can leave something of meaning behind—whether this be art to help capture and translate the beauty of the world, love to make existence even a bit brighter for another human, or ideals to help all live in peace and liberty—then I will consider my life well lived.”  The Villa Medici’s exhibit beautifully balances these ambitions, in using Cavaradossi’s art to contrast and simultaneously unify the painter’s revolutionary politics (his aggressively secular Magdalene, modeled after a political comrade in arms) with his devoted love for the devout Floria Tosca (in each portrait except the painting of her as Minerva, she visibly wears a necklace from which dangles a small cross).  If he could see the exhibit amassed in his name, Cavaradossi would not doubt for an instant that his artistic legacy has left behind much of meaning for everyone who has the privilege to encounter it.

 

“Art, Love, and Liberty in the Works of Mario Cavaradossi” is on display at the Villa Medici until March 15.  Tickets for the exhibit alone are €10 general admission, or €14 general admission for the exhibit and a scheduled guided tour of the Villa Medici.