Titian – Penitent Magdalene

Titian returned to this subject many times, sometimes at the behest of patrons but also because the figure of the weeping woman, remorseful of her sinfulness, enabled him to depict a combination of religious piety, Mary’s new-found faith and devotion, and at the same time to indulge his clients’, and maybe his own, taste for sensuality under the convenient guise of virtue and sanctity.

Titian, Penitent Magdalene, c.1561-65, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

We see a three-quarter length Mary, scantily clothed (other versions show her bare breasted) with her reddened eyes brim-full of tears and directed heavenwards. It is a beseeching pose, as she appeals to God for the forgiveness of her sins. Her long golden ringlets, their looseness indicators of her moral laxity hitherto, cover her shoulders and she hugs them to her chest in an effort to cover herself as her shift has slipped from her right shoulder. Hers is a voluptuously fleshy figure in line with sixteenth-century ideals of female beauty, but her ample corporeality also stands as a visual metaphor for her indulgence in carnality and vice.

But as Waldemar Januszczak explained so brilliantly in his TV programme about the subject (I love Januszczak because he is never less than respectful about religion but always amusingly irreverent about some of the art that it inspired) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV6M0MxPGM0, most of what we know about Mary Magdalene through western art is fictitious. She is only mentioned a few times in The Bible, firstly in the gospel of Luke where Jesus is said to have cast out the demons by which she was possessed, then in the other gospels as a follower of Jesus and ultimately as a witness both to The Crucifixion and The Resurrection. Nowhere in these scriptures is she described as a prostitute. There is a ‘fallen woman’ that washed the feet of Jesus, but she is not named so conflating her with the Magdalene is straightforwardly wrong. That notion first arose following a misleading sermon delivered by Pope Gregory I in 591. The bogus account was further embellished and complicated over succeeding centuries and was then reimagined by Dan Brown in an utterly bonkers way in his popular novel The Da Vinci Code. In this she is fictionalised as having been the lover of Jesus who bore him a child, and this narrative was then pictorially encoded, according to the author’s ludicrous conspiracy theory, into Leonardo’s The Last Supper.

However, setting that fanciful nonsense aside, it is clear that the notion of a repentant prostitute was convenient for the Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation period. The idea of conversion, of finding God, of renouncing sin and finding the true path was a compellingly moralistic story that the church fathers latched onto, and their preaching was in turn given full fervent expression by Renaissance artists.

Titian shows us his version of Mary with a well-thumbed Bible open in front of her, no doubt at a suitably instructive passage of The Old Testament, its pages gilt-edged to denote their aureate sanctity. This sits on top of a human skull, an obvious memento mori, an enjoinder to renounce the sins of the flesh with the gaping maw of eternity in prospect. The skull is missing its bottom jaw with which its owner would have spoken, perhaps to indicate that rightful deeds should always be privileged over weasel words. At the bottom left we can see a glass vessel which would have contained the oil with which Mary anointed Christ’s dead body. The top right quadrant of the painting shows a partially clouded sky with the either the golden light of a new day of faith dawning or the dying rays of the last day of sin. In the middle distance a tree in leaf inclines away to the right. It contrasts with the dark entanglements of the bare and twisted trunk and branches of the tree on the left as it seems to embrace its own illumination. The symbolism is clear. The Latinate form of the artist’s name (his real name was Tiziano Vecellio) is inscribed as Titianus. P. on the left. The ‘P’ is an abbreviation of ‘pinxit’, so the meaning translates as ‘Titian painted this.’

Mary is shown unambiguously as in the grip of powerful emotion, and contemporary viewers were meant to identify with this sinner-turned-saint and to empathise – to feel similarly repentant and to give vent unashamedly to their own animated expressions of self-reproach at their own sinfulness. Mary’s was an example that others were meant to follow. While the church would rail against what it saw as the heresy of Protestantism, the idea of self rather than institutional reformation was bang on message and Titian depicts Mary Magdalene as mending her ways with a fervency so passionate that it also speaks of the extremities of her previous deviancy from the true path. Imagining her prior life of sinfulness would no doubt have stimulated the (male) viewers in one way while this epiphanic moment of contrition instructed them in another.

Perhaps inevitably, Mary Magdalene was always judged in contradistinction to The Virgin Mary, as if they represent the polarity of dissolute sinfulness on the one hand and immaculate virtue on the other. From a present-day perspective, such simplistically binary attitudes towards women as found in The Bible are problematic. These concerns begin with its portrayal of Eve, the first to commit Original Sin in the view of some theologians, by succumbing to temptation and eating the forbidden fruit. So even though Adam made a free choice to eat as well, preachers and artists have persisted in casting Eve as primarily responsible for the pair’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and by extension, to have their view of womankind more generally coloured by this paradigmatic transgression – all mankind inherited her somewhat thrillingly appetitive sinfulness by their accounts.  Views of Mary Magdalene, therefore, are stamped with a misogyny born of blame culture. If the Virgin represents an impossible standard of virtue and Eve the uncontrollable ‘devil woman’, then Titian’s Magdalene allows the viewer to ‘enjoy’ both idealisations of femininity, the sinner and the saint.

As art historians have pointed out, Renaissance painters departed from the stylised and uniform manner of depicting the human form prevalent in the medieval period and, particularly with saintly subjects, ensured that the body, a form that they recognised as made in God’s image, was given naturalistic roundedness and beauty. In simple terms, beauty was considered coterminous with goodness. The corollary of this was that anything lacking in beauty was indicative of moral failure. The fact that the son of God had taken human form in the person of Jesus was also indicative of its obverse: the presence of the divine in mankind, and more importantly in this example, womankind. Titian’s Magdalene has a beauty which ambivalently dwells on her penitence (good) while also reminding us of her past lechery (bad), the allure that tempted men into more sins of the flesh. It therefore asks us a complex question: how can anything bad be beautiful?

Titian’s Mary is all about the body. It is a body whose luminescent flesh stands in marked contrast to the darkness on the left and which is illuminated from above, from the direction of her gaze, the direction of revelation. The immediacy of her aliveness is the antithesis of the skull’s deadness. Hers is a body that has ‘known’ and enjoyed other bodies, but which is now, like Christ’s, ready to be renounced in favour of a higher calling. At the same time, in contrast to Christ’s outstretched arms at his crucifixion, Mary’s arms embrace her own body. While this involves shame, even defensiveness, it also affirms her abiding physicality in our minds as much as it serves as an ardently penitential model for others to follow.