Andrea Sacchi was one of the most important representatives of a more sober Baroque style in seventeenth-century Rome. He executed many paintings for the Barberini family, including an altarpiece commissioned by Pope Urban VIII for the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, where two of the Pope’s nieces were nuns. The painting, now in the Uffizi, depicts St Mary Magdalene, the Blessed Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, and a Mary Magdalene identified in an early inventory as ‘Queen of India or China’.