Her gaze is averted from the viewer, her head turned downward in a position that has been compared to traditional portrayals of the crucified Jesus Christ.
[3] Indeed, most of the many depictions of the subject in art showed the Magdalen with no clothing at all, as in Titian's painting of 1533, it having fallen apart during the thirty years she spent, according to medieval legend, repenting in the desert after the Ascension of Jesus.
It was Caravaggio's departure into realism that shocked his original audience;[2] according to Hilary Spurling in The New York Times Book Reviews (2001), "contemporaries complained that his Mary Magdalene looked like the girl next door drying her hair alone at home on her night in.
"[2] Decades after the painting's completion, 17th-century art biographer Gian Pietro Bellori opined that Caravaggio had feigned religious imagery by adding items associated with Mary Magdalene—a carafe of oil and discarded jewelry—to an otherwise modern genre scene.
Rather, in his Pinacotheca sive Romana pictura et sculptura, published in 1673, he praised it and its painter elaborately: We can see the silent remorse hidden in her conscience, and in the depths of her heart she is burned by a secret flame.