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| Master of the Magdalene, Mary Magdalene and Eight Scenes of her Life, Accademia, Florence 1285 |
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| Titian, Mary Magdalene, Pitti Palace, Florence, 1530-1535 |
The title of my doctoral dissertation can be translated as The Body of Mary Magdalene and its Representations in Italy from the 13th Century through Titian. It is presently in the process of being published. The following is the introduction
Mary Magdalene has always stirred our dreams. She was made up from three women, or facettes of women, in the Bible. First there was the anonymous sinner woman who washed Christ’s feet in the Pharisee’s home. Then there was Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus. Finally there was Mary of Magdala, the woman out of whom devils were exorcised, and first to witness the Resurrection. This mixture has proven so richly attractive to Western minds that, century by century, further accretions have been added to the figure. She has ended up with an entire biography, a profil of her own. Because of this fascination we can conjure up her image immediately : washing Christ’s feet with her long hair undone; in scarlet at the foot of the cross or on Easter morning at Christ’s feet, bearing witness to her love for her Savior; or again as preacher in Marseille; lifted up to heaven by choirs of angels, clothed only in her thick tresses.
It would seem that the turn of the twenty-first century is a particularly strong moment in magdalean thought, we might even speak of a renaissance of the Magdalene in spirituality and the arts. Books and exhibitions and even films devoted to her proliferate. It is time for a deep and large-scale look at this saint, time to chart her origins and the composition of the image we have of her : all tears and perfume, long hair and red robes.
One thing that has always struck me is that where other saints can be recognized by torture instruments that destroyed their bodies, or the bodily fragments the resulted, Mary Magdalen is known by her physical elements: hair tears, robes the color of blood (when she even wears any at all). Her vase and perfume are just as somatic, as we will see in the course of this study. And yet she is the figure of the Christian anima, Bride of the Song of Songs.
How can this be ? Furthermore, how did the amica christi, as she was called in the Middle Ages, join in the procession of the elect, how was she fabricated to do so, marked by mystical love, secrets of the Christ, at the nexus of the soul and the flesh ?
Questioning this phenomenon of her fabrication and her paradoxes has long been part of my own intellectual biography. At the end of the 1990s, I went to the office of Daniel Arasse with a modest dissertation project about Franciscan Magdalens in Venice in the fourtheenth century. Like me, the professor had been taken with this figure to whom he had already devoted some short studies. And we agreed furthermore that the starting point should be the famous Florentine panel of the Magdalene Master from 1280-1285. But Mr. Arasse, as was his wont, had a much larger view in mind. He detailed the sacrifices required by such a narrow choice: Simone Martini, Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini. I had to admit that giving up their works pained me. He continued on with the Magdalenes of Donatello, Botticelli, and others. I began to tremble before this expansion of my subject in time and space, but I couldn’t resist and yielded to his suggestions. Finally, he ended his comments saying that the idea should include Titian, or even Caravaggio : « It would be a shame to leave Caravaggio aside » Such a vast expanse of images seemed to me impossible to address seriously and yet I knew, in the back of my mind that in this, as in so many things, Daniel Arasse was right.
The Magdalene painted by Titian, between 1530 and 1535, repeated so many times, is one of the most famous images of the saint. Her tears signify her as penitent, convert. The sadness however seems to be in contradiction with this woman’s sensuality, a woman we know to have committed sins of the flesh, here so lovingly rendered.
The modern gaze has trouble reconciling a coexistence of the two aspects of this painted subject. It is difficult to believe that the image was ever destined to be taken seriously as a devotional support. As for a certain militant view from those years "she became a manageable, controllable figure, an effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex (…) wilful misinterpetration to suit the purposes of an ascetic Church."1 Strangely, this reading coincides with that of Titian’s Magdalene in which it is called« high class pornography »2 Such interpretations, feminist or otherwise, betray a basic misogyny. Moreover this kind of thought seems to me fundamentally anachronistic for the time period we are covering. Melting into tears and and hair over her naked body, this Magdalene needs to be understood in terms specific to the logic of images, and in terms of her own time period. To do this we must take Vasari’s advice. He said that in order to correctly see any painting by Titian, one must back up.
And that is what we will do, but chronologically. We will go back in time. We must look closely not only at the Magdalene Master’s painting, where we also see her nude but for the veil of her hair. This is also the first time that we see not only the three women of the Bible who become the « composite » Mary Magdalene, (we will see how further on) but also the three components of her medieval legend, as it was being written in that moment, all this in one panel. But to look at this first occurrence, we must also ask about other contemporary representations. How does she emerge like a red profile on the margins of painted crosses carried over hills and valleys across the Italian peninsula These same painted panels will mark the beginning of Italian and thus European art as we know it today.3
The spiritual and intellectual climate of the time was amenable to all that the saint connoted. The Schoolmen, like Bonaventure, were asking questions about the interference of the flesh and the soul, matter and spirit. Women mystics like Claire of Montefalco, just like Saint Francis, were producing bodily miracles bearing witness to their sanctity. One called them "Second Magdalene." This was the time of the first female dissections upon these same women by men who wanted to know their "secrets." In the cloister as at court, fin amor was always pointing to the question of spirituality and desire.
It is not by chance then that in this atmosphere the cult of Mary Magdalene prospered. In 1279, the Angevin prince " invented" (in the medieval sense of "discovered") Mary Magdalene’s relics and tipped the poles of her geopolitical centers from Burgundy to Provence. Not long before, there were the Lives written by Jacques de Vitry and by Jacobus of Voragine. Furthermore it was the moment that all missals were completed with her eight-day feast celebration. Thus the second half of the thirteenth century in Italy is the starting point of any serious interrogation on the image of Mary Magdalene.
To conclude with the sixteenth, Titian’s time, was just as logical. The Reformation, the eve of the Council of Trent, the sack of Rome were all highly significant events for the history of art. At this same period when the converted sinner woman was becoming the standard-bearer of the Counter-Reformation in much more simplified and sugarcoated imagery, there is a dismantling of the composite Magdalene by Lefèbvre d’Etaples, a sort of dissection of what the Middle Ages had constructed. It is no coincidence that our period closes with the dissection of a pregnant woman on the frontispiece of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, illustrated by Titian or his circle. The support was printed by Gutenberg in order to educate a male readership about the "secrets of women" and their specific workings. It was no longer a time for honoring sacred, somatic mysteries, but rather for the analysis of mechanical, crude realities. Titian’s panel is the swan song of a complex and composite Magdalene who implicates the viewer in a relationship engaging this spectator body and soul with the subject of the painting, indeed with the act of painting itself, as we will see.
This study is a work of art history, because at its base, at least as far as I can see, Mary Magdalene is an image, a subject to be gazed at, whose visual cues appeared at the same time as Italian painting itself. Thus we will voyage across Italy from Naples to Venice, passing through Tuscany to see how this figure – whom we believe we know already – came to appear and blossomed. As Daniel Arasse said upon another subject, "There is perhaps a kind of madness in this idea that one might once more attain what was dreamed or imagined" by an artist before his work, or again, "It is not a question of claiming that once has the same state of mind as a fifteenth century burger, but we end up arriving at a horizon, never entirely attainable, and coming closer to the intimacy of the work as it was requested, realized, gazed upon, or experienced." Thus I hope to restore and share as far as I can, the gaze of a young knight in front of the Magdalene Master’s panel, for example, that of a pilgrim or friar in the chapel of the Magdalene at Assisi, or of a man condemned to death in the chapel of the Magdalene in Florence at the Bargello. Each of these works demanded and precipitated an engagement with its chosen spectator. I can lift the veil on this horizon hidden by the centuries until the painting « rises up,» as Daniel Arasse liked to say, and makes sense.
But if Mary Magdalene should be essentially experienced visually, she is above all a woman, indeed Woman : «Ecce Mulier » as one of her theologians said. Thus as the arassian anachronism would have it, this research cannot not engage with feminist debates. Yet, far from any manicheanism (which appears particularly in countries where a history of protestantism has marked the culture with a profound distrust of the image) I hope to bring a vision more founded in history, a sensibility missing from the renewal of interest for the Magdalene. For a close-up study of images leaves us with the clear conclusion that, beyond lay or clerical (past or present) misogynist discourse, a very positive value can be read and shown in a female body bearer of theoligical meaning, well beyond temptation and and sin on one side, and maternity or virginity on the other. The Magdalene leaves a space for contemplating the value of a sexuated and sexual feminine body within a Christian society. What it is forbidden to say, necessarily shows, according the inescapable logic of evasion. In this way, we might imagine a relationship between the human being and God in which Eros has his well earned place after so many years of repression. If Daniel Arasse was right, I can indeed restore that for the gaze of others.
1Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor, New York, Riverhead Books, 1993, p92
2See the analysis of Charles Hope
3Hans Belting, Image et Culte, Paris, Cerf, 1998
