Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael, Saint Mary Magdalene (ca. 1503). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s New York

Artnet_ For only the third time this century, an original painting by renowned Renaissance great Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) is coming to auction. The diminutive oil-on-panel Saint Mary Magdalene, painted circa 1503, when the artist was just 20 years old, could be yours as a little as $2 million to $3 million according to the estimate from Sotheby’s New York, which is offering the painting during its upcoming Old Masters sales.

The painting last came up at auction in May 2000, fetching $611,000 at Christie’s New York. (At the time, the figure was identified as Saint Mary of Egypt.) The panel is actually two-sided, with a circular roundel on the back featuring an almost kaleidoscopic swirl of color.

“You can actually see one of Raphael’s fingerprints on the verso,” Daria Foner, an Old Masters specialist at Sotheby’s, told me, noting that there is also evidence the artist employed a finger painting technique in his famous Mond Crucifixion, painted around the same time and now in the collection of London’s National Gallery.
”He was sort of mottling and mixing these pigments with his hands.”

Originally part of a small triptych that would have been used for personal devotion, the painting is delicate but unusual depiction of Mary Magdalene. She is shown without a jar of oil, her traditional saintly attribute, and is instead wearing a full-length hair shirt, a sign of her renunciation of worldly pleasures and entry into a life of repentance.

“This is Mary Magdalene at a later moment in her life when she’s living a hermetic, almost ascetic existence, and she’s eschewing not just worldly goods, but her own clothing,” Foner said. “It’s unusual, and it’s a superb painting, a wonderful example of Raphael at this really early moment in his career,” after his apprenticeship with Perugino (1450–1523).

This fairly uncommon portrayal of the “Penitent Magdalene” is perhaps best known from the life-size wooden Donatello (1386–1466) sculpture from the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. There are two versions of the subject by Filippino Lippi (1457–1504), a painting at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, and a painting that sold for $2.25 million at Christie’s New York in 2005 and in 2022 at Sotheby’s for just $64,500.

But where Donatello carved Mary with sunken eyes and a heavily lined face, and Lippi showed her haggard and rough, Raphael’s Mary is radiantly beautiful in her hair shirt, suffused with a saintly glow despite her humble garb.

Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael, Saint Mary Magdalene, verso (ca. 1503). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s New York

“She has beautiful, idealized features. Her face is very Peruginesque, which is one of the ways we see that this is a young Raphael, still influenced by these other artists,” Foner said. “But he was working with such technical refinement already at this point in his career. The work has an elegance, a type of grace, and almost sweetness that we associate with Raphael.”

The painting is also a potential bargain, considering that the artist’s record at auction stands at an astronomical £29.16 million ($48 million), a mark set in 2009 at Christie’s London for the chalk drawing Head of a Muse, according to the Artnet Price Database. The chalk drawing was a preparatory work for the artist’s Vatican fresco Parnassus.

Raphael’s most expensive painting, Portrait of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino (1518) sold at Christie’s London in 2007 for £18.5 million ($37.3 million).

Raphael, Portrait of Lorenzo di Medici, Duke of Urbino (ca. 1516–19). Private collection. Public domain

But that work represented Raphael “at the very height of his fame,” Foner said. “And the sitter there is Lorenzo de Medici, the Duke of Urbino, a very very famous person.”

She allowed, however, that the presale estimate here was conservative, and there had been “strong interest” ahead of the auction, especially considering the rarity with which Raphael appears at auction and the scarcity of his works still in private hands.

Besides this work’s previous auction appearance 25 years ago, only two paintings by Raphael have come to auction in the 21st century: Portrait of Lorenzo de Medici and Profile Portrait of Valerio Belli, which sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2016 for $3.2 million.

Raphael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Collection of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy

We don’t know who commissioned the Mary Magdalene painting—one possible theory is Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino. Despite Raphael’s young age at the time of its creation, the artist was already taking frequent commissions, having taken over his the workshop of his father, who died when Raphael was just 13.

The Mary Magdalene painting was originally paired with a panel featuring Saint Catherine of Alexandria, now in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy.

Raphael, spolveri cartoon for Mary Magdalene altarpiece panel. Collection of the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

The middle panel of the altarpiece is lost, but the original full-scale spolveri cartoon Raphael used for the two saints both survive, Mary’s at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, and Catherine’s at the Louvre in Paris. The artist would have pricked holes in the line drawings and then laid the paper over the panel to transfer the image with charcoal.

The auction house has the painting on view at its York Avenue headquarters from Saturday, February 1, through Wednesday, February 5. The auction is slated for Thursday, February 6, and the painting carries an irrevocable bid, meaning it is guaranteed to sell.