Penco, who consulted various studies by scholars and theologians before conducting her own research, said the gospel often describes Mary Magdalene at the moment of Christ’s redemption, and she was fundamental in how salvation could be achieved.

Loading

She said: “The cross-bearer is looking in the direction of Mary Magdalene, it is as if he is estranged from the composition looking towards the woman peacefully holding the wood and the cross.”

Her findings will be published this week in the 240-page book Mary Magdalene in Michelangelo’s Judgement.

Professor Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, from the Gregorian University Department of History and Cultural Heritage in Rome, has endorsed the claim.

She wrote in the book’s forward: “With great intuition, Sara Penco has discovered something that defines the being of art.

“We can clearly see how iconography and theology are linked in Penco’s reasoning to form a vision: the woman kissing the cross has an important role, even if she appears hidden on the edges of the image.”

The Last Judgment, which took Michelangelo Buonarroti four years to complete, attracts more than 5 million visitors to the Sistine Chapel every year.

Painted between 1537 and 1541, it depicts the Second Coming of Christ and the Apocalypse and shows human souls and angels, many of them naked, either ascending to heaven or descending into hell.

Last month, new research claimed Michelangelo may have depicted a woman suffering from breast cancer in his fresco of a biblical flood on the chapel’s ceiling.