While visitors descend on the Dallas Museum of Art for its groundbreaking Dior fashion exhibition this summer, they also have the rare opportunity to see a 16th-century masterwork by Caravaggio. Martha and Mary Magdalene (c. 1598, oil on canvas) is on loan to the DMA from the Detroit Institute of Arts from June 23 to September 22, 2019. It is such an important work that it gets displayed alone in a gallery space as its own exhibition "Caravaggio: Martha and Mary Magdalene," curated by Julien Domercq, the museum's new Lillian and James H. Clark Assistant Curator of European Art.

The painting depicts Mary Magdalene from the Bible — regarded by the Catholic Church at the time to be a prostitute — experiencing a spiritual awakening as her sister Martha counts on her fingers the reasons she should convert. "Caravaggio conveys the moment of Mary’s conversion — a challenging subject — through his treatment of light, which casts a divine glow on the reformed sinner," the museum explains in a release.