The Last Communion of Saint Mary of Egypt

Sebastiano Ricci

National Gallery of Art

A woman kneeling on the ground and leaning toward a wafer held out by a man in a brown robe is surrounded by three winged angels in this vertical painting. The scene is dramatically lit from the upper left, and the people all have light skin. The woman, Saint Mary of Egypt, takes up most of the lower right quadrant of the painting, and she faces our left in profile. Her skin is tinged with gray, and a tear rolls down her gaunt cheek. Her lips are parted as she leans toward the quarter-sized wafer. Her wavy, chestnut-brown hair cascades down her back. She is naked from the waist up except for a white cloth she loosely holds to her chest with her left hand, closer to us. Her other hand is lifted, palm up, and her lower body is wrapped in voluminous, cobalt-blue fabric. The man stands opposite her, to our left, and he leans toward her to offer the wafer with his right hand. He holds a gold plate with his other hand. He is balding with a thick beard and deeply creased face. He wears a patched brown robe and a string of thick beads around his neck. Below him, in the lower left, an angel kneels facing away from us, looking toward Saint Mary. Light shines on the angel’s blond ringlets and along the edges of long, white and dove-gray wings. The angel wears a saffron-yellow tunic. An orange sash flutters at the waist, and a white cloth wraps around the lower body but reveals bare shins and feet. A burning torch is held in one hand, to our right. Another angel with widespread wings hovers in mid-air behind Saint Mary and looks down at her. This second angel’s glowing white wings nearly span the width of the painting. One arm reaches for or braces Saint Mary and the other holds the other end of the cloth Saint Mary clutches to her chest. Dark blond ringlets lift away from the angel’s shadowed face, and folds of the coral-orange garment flutter around the body. A third angel looks on from under one lifted wing, along the right edge of the painting. That angel is seen from the shoulders up with fingertips touching, and has tousled copper-red hair. Two winged baby heads float above the scene and are set against the cream-white and ginger-brown clouds that billow in from the upper right and fill much of the sky. A sliver of royal-blue sky is visible in the upper left.