The Most Beautiful Woman in London

After a painful two-year absence, the most beautiful woman in London is finally back home, on the upper floor of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery of Art. She rarely attracts much attention, for she subscribes to none of the canons of modern beauty. She would be entirely overlooked by the arbiters of contemporary taste and yet, to those with eyes ready to meet her, she belongs incontestably among the most beguiling and significant humans ever to have found form.

Rogier van der Weyden’s The Magdalene Reading (completed in Bruges in the early 1430s) merits our interest on multiple grounds:

— She is beautiful because she is so deeply serious. Modern tastes incline towards happiness. To be pretty is to be smiling – perhaps surfing, too. The old Christian painters understood a more important lesson: life is a tragedy. It all ends in Calvary, in a bloodbath, and so the most dignified attitude to bear on one’s journey through existence must be one of intense, dignified solemnity. Of course, one can smile – at a child playing, at a dog running across a field, at a joke between old friends – but this is joy rendered profound and bittersweet by a continuous awareness of a background of loss and grief.

— She is beautiful because, in her sorrows, she is ready to meet you in your depths. There is no need for superficial pleasantries with her. One wouldn’t have to claim that everything was going well. There would be no point in grandstanding. She would see through the veil and ‘know’ that you (like her) cry a lot, that you’re carrying so much pain, that you are always worried, that you are profoundly lonely, that so few people understand, that there have been so many mistakes. And she would know this of you because she would know it of – and accept it in – herself. She would hold out a hand to you as a fellow ailing sibling and whisper very gently and simply: I know…

— She is beautiful because she doesn’t ask you for perfection. You can be broken around her, and she around you. She has taken to heart the fundamentally consoling idea at the heart of Christianity: that we are all sinners. Which shouldn’t be a remotely depressing thought. It’s what allows us to cast off modernity’s punishing ideals of accomplishment and power. In her religion, there are a few perfect beings at large; they are very much up in the sky. Down here on earth, we’re all mortals – no king or minister can come anywhere close to the grace of an angel, let alone the majesty of the King of Kings, Holy of Holies. We’re all stumbling around, trying to do our best, making mistakes, getting it wrong. And from our acceptance of our mutual imperfection flow friendship, forgiveness and tenderness.

— She is beautiful because she knows how to quietly read a book. She doesn’t need to look at who has just posted what and where. She can keep her own anxieties at bay long enough to enlarge her horizons through the ideas of others. She only occasionally looks up to take in the view or the sound coming from the kitchen. She has time for her thoughts – and therefore, in turn, she will know how to make time for yours.

— She is beautiful because she isn’t remotely thinking about how beautiful she might be. She is interested in her work, her responsibilities, the sacraments, the ways to a good life. She would – fortunately – think us very silly for paying her so much attention.

The French writer Stendhal wrote that ‘beauty is the promise of happiness.’ A beautiful face isn’t, according to this view, just a visual phenomenon; it’s an indicator of the sort of life one might have around someone. Which, in the Magdalene’s case, might mean a life of depth, kindness, gentleness and calm: a way back to our true home.

This woman isn’t an ideal in any remote, punishing sense. She’s no goddess or paragon of purity (according to some accounts, her past was complex). Her dress might be hard to find; her attitude is far more available. She’s a goad to recover contact with all that is serious, settled and kind in us – and those we connect with. She is – as her painter surely hoped she could be – one of our closest friends, waiting for us across the centuries.