The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  To purify the city and impose his ascetic regime, Savonarola organised armies of children to march about the streets, even going into homes, inspecting and confiscating belongings. Scent bottles, mirrors, fans, necklaces, packs of cards, profane books such as the stories of Boccaccio, musical instruments, portraits of beautiful women, furniture too lavish, sculptures too bare – all such things were seized and burned. The most famous immolation took place in February 1497, when tens of thousands of objects were piled high in the Piazza della Signoria and set alight in what became infamous as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

  The poor and middle class were among the preacher’s warmest supporters, but also many artists, writers and scholars had been deeply impressed by Savonarola’s sermons, his sincerity, his vision of a City of God. Among the objects blackening in the flames were paintings considered sensual by the artists themselves, including, it was said, works by Botticelli, who had become a true believer.

  If Mary Magdalene must be a penitent in a cave then she is a voluptuous penitent in this 1522 painting by Antonio Correggio, and a self-improving one, her nipples delicately touching the open pages of a book. The Provençal legend about Sainte Baume allows this figure to be identified as Mary Magdalene; otherwise she is a classical nymph, a child of nature, one of Jupiter’s many delights. These sorts of paintings would adorn bedchambers and studies where they could appeal to the pious and secular alike.

  Mary Magdalene reading in her cave by Correggio. Wikimedia Commons.

  Eventually the city turned against Savonarola; he was accused of heresy and in 1498 he was dangled by the neck above a great pile of wood in the Piazza della Signoria and burnt to death.

  But the outburst of Savonarola’s fundamentalism was a warning and where a man might have commissioned a painting of Venus he might now have a painting of Mary Magdalene. Paintings of undressed Mary Magdalenes proved popular in the sixteenth century as they allowed artists and their secular patrons to combine eroticism and religion without exposing themselves to threat or scandal. Produced for private display in studies and bedchambers, Mary Magdalene was depicted as living in her cave at Sainte Baume, still a supposedly penitent Magdalene; she weeps, she raises her eyes to heaven, she shows her earnestness by opening a book and proves her awareness of the passing of temporal things by leaning against a skull. But her hair is allowed to fall in such ways as to reveal and emphasise the beauty of her body, to draw attention to her femininity. Or her hair covers nothing at all. Nor does she really seem penitent; instead she luxuriates in her warmly seductive appeal.

  Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mary Magdalene

  Until recently Leonardo Da Vinci was not thought to have done a painting of Mary Magdalene (leaving aside those who think that the rather feminine figure leaning against Jesus in Leonardo’s Last Supper is Mary Magdalene – see p.100). And in Leonardo’s forty or so known paintings only very few are nudes, one being Leda and the Swan. But those understandings changed in 2005 when Carlo Pedretti, the world’s leading authority on Leonardo Da Vinci, identified a painting of a bare-breasted Mary Magdalene, previously thought to have been done by Giampietrino, as an authentic original by Leonardo. Giampietrino, a student of Leonardo’s and a prolific painter of Magdalenes, has been accused of doing no more than turning out nudes with ‘a veneer of sanctity’, their hair carefully draped to expose their breasts as they raise their eyes to heaven. Not that he was a slacker; his works are held by major museums around the world including the Hermitage in St Petersberg, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London’s National Gallery.

  This newly identified Leonardo painting, done in 1515, four years before his death, and which depicts Mary Magdalene bare-breasted, wearing a red robe and holding a transparent veil over her belly, has long been in private hands and has been on public view only twice in the last hundred years or so, in 1949 in New York and in 2005 in Ancona. Its recent appearance at an exhibition in Italy was therefore the first chance that Pedretti had to see the painting in person. ‘It is not I who says the painting is by Leonardo; the painting itself forces me to say it’, he said, adding, ‘one extraordinary thing is that it is painted on an intact wood panel, just like the Mona Lisa’.

  This bare-breasted Mary Magdalene has recently been identified as a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, done in about 1515. The exposed breasts associate her with the goddess Venus and also suggest that she is preparing to consummate her marriage. She is entirely frank about her sensuality; her smile is a promise, and soon her fingers will let her robe fall away entirely. There is not an ounce of sin or repentance in this Mary Magdalene.

  Mary Magdalene by Leonardo Da Vinci. Wikimedia Commons.

  Though there are similarities between Mona Lisa and this Mary Magdalene, they are fundamentally different. The Mona Lisa is aloof and self-possessed, but with a sense of mystery and sensuality in her slight smile. Mary Magdalene’s hair falls loose on her shoulders, she throws open her robe to expose her breasts, her right hand tugs at the diaphanous veil across her lower abdomen. She also smiles but not with mystery; she is promising herself to the unseen figure off to her left. At any moment the fingers of her left hand will open and let her robe fall entirely away.

  There was no secret about the meaning of Leonardo’s Mary Magdalene. Portraits of women revealing their breasts were not uncommon in Florence at the time. They were inspired by ancient statues of the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Venus, as Botticelli was famously inspired; they spoke of chastity, beauty and love. Exposing the breasts was also associated with a wedding, with a virginal bride who is about to consummate her marriage.

  Leonardo’s Mary Magdalene is a woman who repents of nothing, who feels no shame or guilt. She feels no contradiction between the spiritual and the erotic as she prepares to consummate her relationship. She is the creation of the greatest humanist and artist of the Renaissance and she has escaped from a world of sin.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Modern Mary Magdalene

  IN 1517, ABOUT TWO YEARS after Leonardo Da Vinci painted his bare-breasted Mary Magdalene, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, a French theologian and philosopher, and a Dominican scholar who had trained in humanist criticism in Florence, published his argument that there was no historical basis for saying that Mary Magdalene was the sinner woman in Luke nor was she Mary of Bethany. In making his case against the composite Mary Magdalene he called on the works of Origen, Jerome and other Church Fathers, and in flatly rejecting the homily of Gregory the Great he declared that the authority of the gospels is greater than that of the pope. Lefèvre d’Etaples was censured by the Sorbonne and accused of heresy, and for a while he had to go into exile, but he never gave up his Catholic faith. Had the Church been receptive to what he had to say history might have turned out very differently, not because it would have averted the Reformation but it might have had some effect on the evolution of Catholic thought, particularly towards women.

  Instead, and also in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, the act that began the Protestant Reformation. Influenced by humanist critical thinking which had spilled over from Renaissance Italy into Germany, Luther argued – as Lefèvre d’Etaples had done – that the gospels had greater authority than any opinion of the pope’s. He began by criticising the selling of indulgences, saying the pope had no authority over purgatory, and he was scathing about the cult of saints, saying that their efficacy had no foundation in the New Testament. As for the means to salvation, Luther dismissed confirmation, holy orders, extreme unction, matrimony and penance, five of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church; the Eucharist, he said, was merely symbolic, a commemoration of the Last Supper. Salvation lay only in baptism. Neither confession nor penance was necessary; baptism removed the stain of original sin.

  Martin Luther holds up his Ninety-Five Theses to ward off a monstrous beast representing the pope.

  Luther wards off a monstrous pope. Wikimedia Commons.


  The Persistence of the Penitent

  Yet despite the assault on penance and the cult of saints, Mary Magdalene remained a revered saint for Lutherans and Anglicans and many other Protestants, just as she had been in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Moreover, Luther himself retained his belief in the composite Mary Magdalene – that she was also Mary of Bethany as well as the sinner woman of Luke – and much Protestant literature continued to emphasise the penitent whose sins had been forgiven because of her love for Jesus.

  In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church launched its Counter-Reformation with the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563, which reaffirmed the efficacy of saints but pared down the many attributes that had adhered to them over the ages, preferring to emphasise just one and basing that as much as possible on history rather than legend. In Mary Magdalene’s case her role as apostle to the apostles was dropped as it was regarded as legendary and the entire focus was put on her penance – specifically at Sainte-Baume, despite that fact that the story of Mary Magdalene at the cave lacked any historical pedigree.

  For both Protestants and Catholics, Mary Magdalene as a penitent was too important and useful to drop. Paintings of Mary Magdalene proliferated, her innocence the excuse for her nakedness, her sensuality too alluring to discard. Both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation confirmed the naked and ecstatic and penitent Mary Magdalene luxuriating in her cave at Sainte-Baume as a popular and acceptable religious pin-up, an image that remains in the Western mind to this day.

  The Great Social Evil

  With the growth of cities from the late Middle Ages and into the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prostitution became more prevalent and visible. Cities meant opportunity but they were also places to which people were driven when the old social and economic order was breaking down – and in the case of women they could be a place of anonymity and refuge when their lives had been ruined by careless love or the persuasions or insistence of a farm hand or the master of the house.

  Mary Magdalene by French figure painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre in 1876. The naked, ecstatic and penitent Mary Magdalene luxuriating in her cave became a popular and acceptable religious pin-up.

  Mary Magdalene by Jules Joseph Lefebvre. Wikimedia Commons.

  Prostitution in the Middle Ages was a matter for the secular authorities but the Church also involved itself. The Church saw prostitution as a grave sin but also as a necessary evil for directing the desires particularly of young men who could not yet afford to marry. As St Augustine had said in De Ordine, ‘If you eliminate prostitutes from society, you will disrupt everything through lust’. Instead the Church looked to the harvest: a fallen woman was a soul to save. Mary Magdalene was pressed into service as the saint who herself had once been a sinner and the saint’s name was given to half-way houses for prostitutes.

  In London the first such institution was founded in Whitechapel in 1758 by a committee of merchants. The women had to be under thirty years of age and sincere in their desire to give up prostitution; preference for admission was given to the youngest and least experienced. The committee proposed that the place be called the Magdalene House for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes.

  One of their number, James Hanway, objected to the name. ‘It does not appear to me’, he said, addressing the committee, ‘that Mary Magdalene was deficient in point of chastity, as is vulgarly understood. I rather imagine she was not. It is certain she was a lady of distinction, and of a great and noble mind. Her gratitude for the miraculous cure performed upon her was so remarkable that her story is related with the greatest honour, and she will ever stand fair in the records of fame.’ In the event, Hanway accepted that their patron should be Mary Magdalene, reasoning that St Luke’s Hospital had been founded to house madmen, ‘but that would not occasion our posterity to consider this Evangelist as a madman’. Anyway, he observed, ‘the dedication of your institution to her memory is entirely consistent with the honour due to her character’.

  Hanway’s sympathy for prostitutes is expressed in the rulebook he wrote for Magdalene House:

  There cannot be greater Objects of Compassion than poor, young thoughtless Females, plunged into ruin by those Temptations to which their very youth and personal advantages expose them . . . What virtue can be proof against such formidable Seducers, who offer too commonly, and too profusely promise, to transport the thoughtless Girls from Want, Confinement, and Restraint of Passions, to Luxury, Liberty, Gaiety, Joy? and once seduced, how soon their golden dreams vanish! Abandoned by the Seducer, deserted by Friends, contemned by the World, they are left to struggle with Want, Despair, and Scorn, and even in their own defence to plunge deeper and deeper into sin, till Disease and Death conclude a human Being.

  Yet come the nineteenth century that compassionate approach would change; the idea that young women were the victims of circumstances or of their own innocence or of predatory seducers was dismissed and instead they were were accused of being predators themselves, deliberately attempting to destroy society. A passage in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles tells how extensive prostitution had become in London and of the hypocrisy with which it was met:

  What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds – a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never – or hardly ever – have so many great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private lives.

  Fowles drew his information from William Acton’s contemporary book Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities and Garrison Towns, with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of Its Attendant Evils, published in London in 1857. But Acton expresses no such compassion as that of Hanway a hundred years earlier. Instead he warns of the dangers posed by prostitutes:

  Such women, ministers of evil passions, not only gratify desire, but also arouse it. Compelled by necessity to seek for customers, they throng our streets and public places, and suggest evil thoughts and desires which might otherwise remain undeveloped. Confirmed profligates will seek out the means of gratifying their desires; the young from a craving to discover unknown mysteries may approach the haunts of sin, but thousands would remain uncontaminated if temptation did not seek them out. Prostitutes have the power of soliciting and tempting. Gunpowder remains harmless till the spark falls upon it; the match, until struck, retains the hidden fire, so lust remains dormant till called into being by an exciting cause.

  In Victorian Britain prostitution was seen as the single greatest threat to society. Contemporaries called it the Great Social Evil. Certainly the country was undergoing a great upheaval; agricultural reforms and the industrial revolution saw a massive increase in the population which doubled from 1812 to 1851 and by 1900 had doubled again, an explosion that was accompanied by a great migration of the population from the countryside to factory towns and cities. The young in particular, men and women, were drawn into urban life where instead of finding opportunity they often faced unemployment and poverty and lived in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions. The effect on women could be devastating. In 1885 the investigative journalist W.T. Stead published a series of articles called The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon in which he compared London to the Minotaur’s labyrinth, awash with women sacrificed to the monster of modern society.

  Ostensibly offering flowers but selling something more, this madeline, as street girls were called after Mary Magdalene, was one of 80,000 prostitutes in London in the 1850s. The Great Social Evil was seen as the greatest threat to British society in the nineteen
th century.

  Victorian prostitute. Mary Evans Picture Library.

  Poverty and degredation were a problem and could not be hidden; urbanisation meant that the rich and poor lived close together. But instead of seeing a threat coming from the lower classes generally, the Great Social Evil came from women in the form of prostitution. The 1864 Contagious Diseases Act subjected prostitutes to a fortnightly internal examination. Nevertheless the notion took hold that prostitutes were about to wipe out the population. One doctor calculated that 500 women could annually infect 3,304 men which would lead to a total of 1,652,500 men and women becoming infected in the year. A campaigner declared that three quarters of all British men had a venereal disease, while talk went round that prostitutes were no better than paid murderers, committing their crimes with impunity. The collapse of an entire generation was expected and with it the fall of the British Empire.

  But what seems to have been the great fear at the heart of the Great Social Evil was not disease, which was effectively controlled by the successive Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, nor even immorality, rather the apparent freedom from male control enjoyed by prostitutes. Instead of filling the roles of obedient wife and mother at home, financially dependent on their husbands, it was complained that prostitutes boldly walked about in public, soliciting business and selling sex – and though it went unmentioned, managing their financial independence. Whether prostitutes lived as freely and comfortably as that was not the point; they challenged the rules and structure of society; their ability to survive without men was a threat.