A drawing of three female saints, two seated and one kneeling upon clouds. There are three putti between them, and smaller figures of river gods below them. This is a study for the composition of The Three Magdalens, formerly in the Cenacolo di S Salvi.

Andrea Sacchi was one of the most important representatives of a more sober baroque style in seventeenth-century Rome. He executed many paintings for the Barberini family, including an altarpiece commissioned by Pope Urban VIII for the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, where two of the Pope’s nieces were nuns. The painting, now in the Uffizi, depicts St Mary Magdalene, the Blessed Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, and an unidentified Mary Magdalene ‘Queen of India or China’.

A painting of St Mary Magdalene, the Blessed Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, and Mary Magdalene, ‘Queen of India or China’, seated among clouds, was described by Bellori in his manuscript life of Sacchi as among the works painted for Cardinal Antonio Barberini.Roberto Longhi first related this description to an altarpiece then in San Salvi, Florence and now in the Uffizi, with a smaller version of the same composition in Palazzo Corsini, Rome.

Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi (1566-1607) had been a nun at the Carmelite convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence. She was beatified by Urban VIII in 1626, after which the Carmelites - among whom were two nieces of the Pope - obtained permission to establish a convent dedicated to her, on the site of a monastery at Borgo Pinti. Building work was paid for by the Pope, his sister-in-law Donna Costanza, and his nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Among other gifts to the convent, in January 1634 the Pope

’... in gratitude for the finger of the Blessed [Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi] that he had received, sent them a silver cross with a fragment of the wood of the True Cross. The cross was supported by two angels, with a silver base on an ebony pedestal, and, at the sides, relics of the Penitent St Mary Magdalene and of the Blessed Mary Magdalene, martyr of Japan, with a small empty oval left for a relic of St Mary Magdalene dei Pazzi. He also sent them a large painting in which was depicted the three aforementioned saints.’

It is probable that the painting sent to Florence in 1634 was that now in the Uffizi. From early inventories it seems that Sacchi executed a second large version for Antonio Barberini’s own collection, which Bellori knew and which is recorded in Rome from around 1645 to 1850 (after which it disappears). The Florence version is not mentioned in any early guidebooks and may have been placed in the closed part of the convent, though an apparently derivative painting of the three saints by Livio Mehus suggests that Sacchi’s altarpiece was known to Florentine artists. The identity of St Mary Magdalene of Japan, India or China (depending on the reference) has not been established; Sutherland Harris noted that in the painting ‘she holds glowing coals, and was presumably roasted to death, but all the seven Mary Magdalenes martyred in Japan before 1633 were crucified or beheaded.’

The basic layout of the composition is established here, but there are many differences between drawing and painting, most notably the presence in the drawing of three river gods in an indeterminate landscape, and the more spacious composition, akin to Sacchi’s Allegory of Divine Wisdom of c.1630 in the Palazzo Barberini. In the final composition the landscape was eliminated, and the figures increased in scale to fill much of the picture surface. A number of studies of individual figures and draperies probably connected with the painting are to be found at Düsseldorf.

Inscribed lower right, pen: And.a Sacchi

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007