Previously unknown to scholars, the St Magdalene from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp was acquired by the Louvre in 2006. A stunning addition to the museum collection, it demonstrates the coherence, through a wide variety of styles, of Metsys’s work, which often found modern expression in an affected archaism. Its attribution to Metsys and its place at the heart of both the painter’s oeuvre and the panorama of Flemish painting in the first quarter of the 16th century are at the core of this study.