“Leonardo’s Mary Magdalene: An Ideal of Painting and the Power of Love,” by Luke Syson, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Art/Photo

Leonardo da Vinci’s fragmentary sheet depicting Mary Magdalene—which will be included in the special exhibition Mantegna to Matisse—is among the artist’s most beautiful and least studied drawings. From this small sketch came his revolutionary portraits The Lady with an Ermine and La Belle Ferronniere, and later his mysteriously moving Saint John the Baptist. With these works, Leonardo demonstrated how painting could occupy a space between the sacred and the profane, the real and the imagined, the present and the remote, and the actual and the implied.