Originally published at The Catholic Thing
Mary Magdalene has been identified among the 300 tangled figures depicted in Michelangelo’s celebrated Sistine Chapel masterpiece after a centuries-long hunt by Sara Penco, an Italian art restorer, who says her research suggests a strawberry-blonde woman in The Last Judgment, depicted kissing a wooden cross held by Christ, is the famous female disciple. Painted between 1537 and 1541, The Last Judgment depicts the Second Coming of Christ and the Apocalypse, showing human souls, many of them naked, either ascending to heaven or descending into hell.
