The Magdalen Reading
Rogier van der Weyden (c. before 1438)
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
A young woman ignores the drama around her; it seems she has learned to leave the room without her body. White head scarf, white book open in her hands, her dress a swath of green matching the grass beyond the background windows. A silent still point. The rectangular windows echo columns of text. It’s as if her scarved head and the white book are contiguous; as if the text transports her out of the room. She’s seated on a low cushion, immersed, though around her various red-and-blue-robed saints—Saint John, Saint Joseph—make their way toward the now-missing panel of the Virgin and child. But this panel, her panel, centers on the green, green dress and the young woman’s face—a clear white oval, eyelids half-moons floating over the book, lips dark pink and closed. On the floor beside her stands a curved white jar, white as the book, white as her head scarf, curved as her body beneath the green dress, settled here in the room of walking saints, whose own bodies block her exit, even as she travels beyond.
She seems unaware of the saints, the painter, anyone else. Say she has the privacy of thought: perhaps the view out the window—a green field, a lake—reveals her interior life.
A distinctive face, luminous: study her the way the artist did and you might grieve the loss of her, this contemplative girl, whoever she was, the passing centuries thin as light. And say you recognize something about her? How might you find her again, between here and the fifteenth century? Between here and a verdant elsewhere.