Donatello Penitent Magdalene

I think this is one of the most nakedly powerful works of art in the entire world. It's one of the great things. It's Mary Magdalene in the Wilderness by Donatello, a piece of life turned into sculpture. Absolutely extraordinary in the rawness of its realism. Vasari said that Donatello had the powers almost of a sorcerer to conjure dead matter into the semblance of life, and this is a great example of that. Yes, there was Donatello, the first great classical Renaissance artist, but in this, this is Donatello as the purest of realists. He is imagining himself back into the time of those who lived immediately after Jesus Christ. He's imagining himself back into the heart and the soul of the penitent Mary Magdalene, who wears these rags. She wears her own hair as her clothing. Her skin seems almost to be falling off her. She's starved herself into a state of penitential mystical rapture. It just transports you to this place that you could never really go unless it had been for Donatello's imagination. If you want to imagine how it feels to give yourself to God and to become a mystic, a hermit, a recluse to live in the desert for years on end, this is it. This is Mary Magdalene, central casting. She can never be acted better than this, and she's acted like this forever thanks to the hand and the eye and the mind of Donatello, who for me is perhaps the greatest of all artists, certainly one of the top three artists who ever lived.