Recently restored, the 18th-century wooden sculpture, owned by the Arciconfraternita della Morte from the black sack of Molfetta, is a precious testimony of past art that has led to a series of studies, research, and insights that have contributed to the restoration of the original facies of the work.

In this sense, some bibliographic references have proved fundamental, especially the information about the sculpture and its history reported in the text Diary for the Confraternity of Death by Orazio Panunzio in 1987: the Molfetta scholar who speaks of a statue donated to the congregation of Death by a devotee, Maria Maddalena de Beatis and, therefore, not made specifically for the procession.

"In fact, it did not represent the saint during the Passion and Death of Jesus, at the foot of the cross or near the tomb, but depicted her at a later time, when she was penitent in the desert. [...] The unknown sculptor had created the statue in full expressive freedom, as was indeed in the spirit of the century: the bust and the lap gathered in a rough mat, leaving legs and arms uncovered and a breast naked."

Despite the particularly bold rendering of the figure, the statue was carried in procession for many years and only at the end of the 19th century, by the will of the ecclesiastical authority, according to Panunzio, it was reworked by a local craftsman, who covered her breast and legs up to the knees.

Attributable to a skilled Neapolitan sculptor, the work is exhibited at the Diocesan Museum since June 2009, the year of the inauguration of the renovated premises, along with other versions of Maddalena, commissioned in the early 20th century by the Arciconfraternita, and continues to be an important reference along with some valuable paintings for the reconstruction of the iconography and the study of its diffusion in the Apulian context.