Formerly the property of Caterina Marcenaro, who had the canvas relined and restored (operations performed respectively by D. Podio and A. Arrigoni in 1967 and 1968), the painting was attributed by her to Dürer. The attribution to Scipione Pulzone from Gaeta was put forward by Federico Zeri in connection with the investigations carried out in 1976, when ownership of the collection was transferred to the Cariplo. Zeri’s opinion proves particularly significant in view of the fact that the Roman art historian was one of the greatest experts on Pulzone and wrote an acute study on him in the late 1950s.

One of the leading figures in late Mannerism, Gaetano drew stylistically upon the great masters of the 16th century and his own colleagues active in Rome in the second half of the century, from Santi di Tito to the Zuccari brothers, as well as Jacopino da Conte, his master.

In particular, as Alessandro Rovetta points out, Pulzone’s model for the dramatically bowed figure seems to be the prototype of Correggio’s Mary Magdalene in the Deposition (1527, Galleria Nazionale, Parma). This was widely known through an engraving by Adrien Collaert with a caption describing the episode precisely as Mary Magdalene weeping beside the tomb on realising that it was empty and assuming that the body of Christ had been stolen.

The Cariplo canvas displays marked similarities with a version of the same subject painted by Pulzone for the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. The careful and highly sophisticated depiction of the clothing with the extraordinary minute rendering of the silver brocade and gilded embroidery of plant motifs, the highlights of the hair, the descriptive detail of the jar of ointment, which seems to be a copy a fine specimen of the goldsmith’s art of the time painted from life, and the splendid landscape all make the canvas an important stage in the early work of an artist still influenced by the Florentine Mannerist focus on the elaborate rendering of every detail. For this reason, the Mary Magdalene at the Tomb should be regarded as coeval with the painting of 1574 in San Giovanni. It may even have been painted some time earlier, as the figure of the saint proves far more restrained in the work of 1574, possibly heralding the stylistic and spiritual evolution whereby Pulzone, as noted by Federico Zeri, came to adopt a very distant, austere and unadorned vocabulary fully in line with the Counter Reformation school of which he was one of the leading representatives. The Caripolo Magdalene instead displays the great virtuoso skills that the artist employed in his many portraits of the Roman nobility.

As Rovetta points out, there is another version of the Magdalene in a private collection in the Emilia region attributed to the Flemish artist Denis Calvaert. Though incorrect, this attribution is indicative of Pulzone’s links with Flemish painting, which emerges above all in the portraits and confirms his ability to draw upon different sources in an openly Mannerist spirit.