The statue depicting Mary Magdalene, carried in procession on Holy Saturday in Molfetta, represents the second version of the work created in 1955 by the sculptor from Molfetta, Giulio Cozzoli (Molfetta 1882-1957). Since his youth, the artist had a special predilection for this subject, which he considered interesting for its aesthetic and psychological implications. Numerous terracotta sketches, drawings, and sketches testify to Giulio Cozzoli's study, passion, and hard work.

The first version of the sculpture was created on the initiative of the artist concurrently with Mary Salome, and both, when completed, were exhibited to the public in the summer of 1950 at Palazzo Cappelluti.

With Mary Magdalene, the master reached the highest level of his artistic production; the years spent studying details, expressions, and expressions of this figure gave the sculpture an impressive realism and a profound emotion that seemed to pervade every part of her body.

A young woman, tall, beautiful, with long wavy hair, her head slightly turned back, her neck bare, her face with eyes half-closed, marked by tears, as suffering as passionate in the representation of pain that seems to find its climax in the position of her outstretched, uncovered arms and in the convulsive intertwining of her hands.

It is said that the artist was inspired by a beautiful Russian girl named Tatiana Sokolov, who in those years lived in Molfetta with her father, a former officer of the Tsar. Both had emigrated to Italy after the revolution.

The drama of Mary Magdalene and her passionate femininity, rendered so deeply and expressively in the movements of the sculpture, cost the artist the rejection of the work by the bishop of the time, Monsignor Achille Salvucci, who considered the statue unsuitable for a mystical procession and vetoed the Confraternity for the purchase.

The great disappointment for the rejection of a work that had engaged and partly tormented him for many years of his life deeply embittered the artist. Despite the resentment, the following year he returned to work to skillfully shape the papier-mâché and create the last statue in the series, the one that would complete a project that began in the early twentieth century with the creation of Dead Christ (1906) for the Pieta and Veronica (1907).

Over the course of about a hundred and fifty years, the statues depicting Mary Magdalene were even five, each of which, in addition to the skill of the craftsmen and the fashions and tastes of different eras, encapsulates all the tension and emotional charge of a woman who experienced the salvation of the Lord, was close to Him in the tragic moment of the Passion, and was the first witness to His Resurrection.