The Assumption of Magdalena

The Assumption of Mary Magdalene, painted in 1616 and now in the Museo di Capodimonte, belongs to Lanfranco's early Roman period when he was producing some of his most inventive smaller-scale religious works. The legend of Magdalene's daily levitation — carried aloft by angels in the wilderness as a form of ecstatic sustenance — offered an irresistible opportunity for a painter developing his command of aerial figures and complex compositional rhythms. Lanfranco had studied the ceiling frescoes of Correggio in Parma, with their radical foreshortening and upward-rushing figures, and this Neapolitan work shows how early he began to adapt those lessons to canvas painting. The theme also had Counter-Reformation relevance, affirming the intercessory power of the saints and the possibility of mystical experience.

Oil on canvas, the ascending composition required Lanfranco to solve the challenge of convincingly foreshortened figures seen from below — a problem he would return to in his great ceiling frescoes. His 1616 handling is already fluent, with angels rendered in overlapping planes that suggest recession into the upper space.