Mary of Egypt

Angelo Maccagnino's Mary of Egypt, painted around 1450 and now in the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, depicts one of the most dramatically conceived female saints of the medieval tradition — the fifth-century Alexandrian prostitute who, after a miraculous conversion experience at the Holy Sepulchre, spent forty-seven years alone in the desert of the Jordan, her only companion the lion who brought her food and eventually dug her grave. Mary of Egypt was a saint who attracted particular attention because her extreme asceticism and solitary repentance challenged conventional gender roles and provided a model of salvation through personal transformation rather than institutional religion.

Tempera on panel. Mary of Egypt is shown in the desert landscape of her forty-seven years of solitary penitence, her hair grown to cover her nakedness — a figure of radical physical transformation testing the painter's ability to render the human body in extremity.