The Penitent Smoking Flame
by Mel Johnson
Western Washington University
Mel Johnson is a Western Washington University student majoring in English Literature and Creative Writing. She has been writing her whole life and has a few prior publications. You can find her on Instagram @driedmangoes.andwriting!
July 28th, 2023
I am not an inherently religious person, I have spent too many hours searching for meaning in things that I cannot convince myself exist, that I do not have enough love for to push past my doubts. Yet here I am, staring at a painting of a religious woman, painted by a religious man in the Louvre. I have been here for at least twenty minutes, though I am starting to lose track of time. But I know I can not pry myself away from her. Because I have tried a few times, and I have failed.
I found her via an internet search because I knew how many paintings were going to be in this building, and I did not want to miss out on the hidden gems. I already saw the Mona Lisa, from a distance, sure, but she was not as important to me as this woman. I knew my mother had been walking around, looking at the other paintings in the wing of the floor we were in that I had dragged her to be in. Our footsteps had banged with a hunger on the marble floors and the wooden staircases, as we desperately searched for this painting of a woman that I had been losing faith in the existence of. That had already happened once, that I had found a painting on the internet and it told me it would be here, but upon searching had been moved to a different museum. I was convinced that had happened again, that I must have been wrong, I must’ve looked at the wrong website, she must have been moved somewhere else, my brain clamored with these insecurities and doubts but I pushed past them enough to end up on back stairs and elevators that probably said do not admit in French but if it did we never saw it and anyway—wouldn’t have understood it if we did because neither of us took French in high school. And anyway, I simply wouldn’t have been able to find it in myself to care because I needed to see her and the closer we got to her, the more anxious I felt, my desire only grew deeper in anticipation. On one of those staircases, my mother had said, “I don’t feel like we should be here.” She was probably right, but I ignored her as I often did as her child, and when those passages spit us out onto the most drab and ugliest floor of this otherwise beautiful building, with its white walls and its fluorescent lighting that I didn’t think could exist anywhere else than ancient classrooms in my university, doctors' offices, and cubicles, but certainly never in Paris. I was so grateful, because despite the way the lights made my eyes burn, my only thoughts were in the candlelight in this painting.
Finally, after twenty minutes of staring at the painting I looked down at the information plaque.
Georges de LA TOUR
The Penitent Magdalene
About 1640-1645
Oil on canvas
The Penitent Magdalene La Tour calls her. pen·i·tent, adjective, feeling or showing sorrow and regret for having done wrong; repentant. In an internet search for this painting, it would tell you that it’s called Magdalene with the Smoking Flame. But the Louvre plaque has a much more romantic title, perhaps leaning into Pope Gregory I’s 591 sermon that describes Mary as a “penitent prostitute.” There’s no biblical evidence behind Mary being a prostitute, but Pope Gregory I must put reason behind this woman who was honored as the “apostle to the apostles,” she must have done something else. Mary sits at a table, staring at a singularly together flame that fades into the air as it approaches the tip, one hand on her chin, one hand on the skull that sits on her lap as she contemplates death as the end of all things, her body is mostly facing the viewer save for her head which holds the eyes which fixes their gaze on the flame. The oil on canvas sits trapped in a gold frame in the Denon Wing of the Louvre; she is largely abandoned as people turn their attention to the Mona Lisa. If it were not for the eighteen-year-old who searched what paintings she might want to see while she was in this massive building, Mary Magdalene might have gone unnoticed for the day. I stare at this painting and wonder why I wandered into forbidden parts of this museum to see a woman who believed in something I could not. Would I have noticed her among the other great works if I had not researched her first? Would she still have beckoned me forward into her candlelight, or would I have noticed her for only a moment and walked away? I will probably wonder about these questions forever.
July 20th, 2025
Georges de La Tour learned tenebrism from Caravaggio. Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl which led to a death sentence, which led to him fleeing from Rome to Naples. His innovations inspired Baroque painting and as André Berne-Joffroy stated, “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is quite simply, modern painting.” His most famous paintings are of murder and violent acts, and though La Tour might have learned his skills from Caravaggio, he did not learn his themes from him. Caravaggio paints of Judith Beheading Holofernes by candlelight. La Tour paints of The Education of the Virgin, the book held intimately close to the candlelight but not enough to burn it.
I know that Georges de La Tour died in 1652, and that he was largely forgotten after his death until the German art historian Hermann Voss rediscovered his paintings. Voss was appointed by Hitler to loot art that he didn’t believe was good enough, so it could be burned and destroyed. La Tour, a French Catholic Baroque artist, placed his main focus on religious art, in which he placed the figures by candlelight.
There is no evidence of La Tour's paintings having been the ones at the Nazis auctions, but isn’t that the point? Did we not lose the Library of Alexandria with no record of what could have been in there? How much world-changing art have we lost with no record that it was ever gone?
I am wandering around the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. when I find Mary Magdalene once again. I’d recognize her anywhere by now but I pull out my phone and scroll to my time in the Louvre in my photos just to check my sources. Now I see her and she is faced away from me. But there is still La Tour’s candlelight illuminating her face, and not much else. But now the skull is on the desk instead of her lap, and yet she still places gentle fingertips on its head, and she continues to contemplate death as the end of all things. I did not know she would be here. It has been two years since I last saw her, and even though I so adamantly searched for her in the Louvre, that was the last time I considered her. She found me this time.
In a month, I will be a junior in college. When I saw her the first time, I was freshly out of high school. Even still, I am left with the same questions. Looking at her again feels like looking at my eighteen-year-old self, only from a different angle. Kinder eyes even. She had really been struggling with life and her head and knowing what her future looked like, and two years later, those things were still true, even if their causes had changed.
I do not believe in fate, and I question why awful things happen if everything happens for a reason, but I question if I was meant to see Mary in the Louvre. If La Tour’s other paintings had really been burned and forgotten about, was I then here to give his paintings memory again? Or had Mary found me two years later because she knew I needed her again. That I needed to be reminded of the eighteen-year-old who was just as scared as I am now, and she got through it, so I could too. Or maybe I have spent too many hours searching for meaning in things that don’t have any, and I just happened upon this painting because museums love Baroque art.
I check the date on the picture I took when I saw Mary in the Louvre, July 28th 2023. I look at the date that I’m seeing Mary in Washington D.C, July 20th 2025. I smile to myself, take another picture of her, and walk away from her.