Neither saint nor sinner, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene is evocatively alive | Art and design

A Woman bangs her head back. Her eyes and mouth are closed but she is awake. With rosy cheeks, red lips, and long golden hair, she glows from a sharply lit flame in a room shrouded in darkness. Her fabrics range from a lace-trimmed shirt blouse — which slides down her right shoulder, exposing her porcelain skin — to a heavy yellow and purple material, and she appears to be alone. Unaware of our existence, they exist in a state of transcendence, but also in a state of freedom.

The woman we are looking at is Mary Magdalene “In a State of Ecstasy,” painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, the famous Italian Baroque artist of the early 1620s, best known for her heroic and powerful depictions of mythological and biblical women. The painting was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and will be on display – for free – starting February 24. While it is, historically, the institution’s first acquisition by Gentileschi, it is also an image that shows the saint “neither repentant nor suffering,” as museum curator Letizia Treves wrote. It is an important distinction because, over centuries, the image of Magdalene was not only shaped by the Bible, but was recounted and mixed by powerful men.

“The most flexible female figure in Christian art,” scholar Diane Apostolos Cappadonna told me. Look at its pictures and you will see a reader, a preacher, a follower, and a witness. She cries at the foot of the cross, washes Christ’s feet, or looks up to heaven—repenting her sins with pearl-like tears—and often bares her breast with ease. Sometimes identified by her jar of ointment or red robe (in contrast to the blue of the Holy Virgin Mary), she is known today as a lover of Christ or a prostitute, although there is no passage in the Bible that describes her as such.

“The truth is we don’t know who she is,” Apostolos Cappadonna said. “And so all these layers of interpretation fell upon it. And the transformations that it undergoes, not only visually but narratively, devotionally, and theologically, have as much to do with cultural attitudes and theological transformations as they do with belief.” So what do we know?

Mary Magdalene is mentioned in the Gospels 12 times. The first time we meet her, seven “demons” have been exorcised from her; The rest follows her presence at Christ’s crucifixion and as the first to witness his resurrection. She is the one who spreads the “good news.” Her sexual and sinful reputation can be traced largely to a sermon delivered by Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century, in which he confused her with Mary of Bethany and the “unnamed” sinner who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.

By combining them into one, Pope Gregory effectively “created” the repentant prostitute – a myth that was taken up in greater detail by the seventh-century theologian Sophronius (who confused her with Mary of Egypt) and the medieval Golden Myth (which asserted that she was repentant). Artists took notice – perhaps part of its appeal was its flexibility – and in a predominantly illiterate (but visually literate) world, it proved influential. As her “seven demons” became the “seven deadly sins,” her dominant story was established as one of sexual downfall and subsequent moral redemption—embodied in artistic visualizations that still make us believe these stories today.

From Donatello’s emaciated, skeletal woodcut Magdalene clasping her hands together weakly in remorse, to Caravaggio’s 1606 depiction of her drained of color and on the threshold of death—not to mention Rubens’s near-naked, possessed Magdalene carried by angels—Mary Magdalene has often been sexually denigrated. Dürer’s print showed her shyly gesturing one foot in front of the other, with a giant halo and piles of hair cascading over her naked body, while Titian’s version looked up into the divine light, glassy eyes intact, hands strategically placed to expose her breasts from her shimmering hair.

Suffering and sex seemed to be the dominant poles when it came to her representation: she could warn women against sexual assault, be the poster girl for repentance while offering artists an excuse to paint semi-nudity disguised as piety. The “redeemed fallen woman” has persisted for centuries – so profound that the Catholic Church called its prison-like institutions that forced unpaid labor “Magdalene laundries,” which closed only thirty years ago.

But what if there was another side to her story? What if her story was one of spiritual awakening and transformation, depicted as full of life, joy, and transcendence? In other words, what if we looked at it through the eyes of a woman?

That’s what Gentileschi does. Her Magdalene does not put on a show for the viewer, does not cry, does not repent, does not shame, does not sexualize, does not dictate a moral lesson. Instead, she is rosy-cheeked and, as Treves writes, “living passionately… in the throes of ecstasy.” Gentileschi “gives Mary Magdalene an exciting vitality,” said Eve Straussmann-Flanzer, curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art.

As I’ve written before, often when women portray biblical or mythological women, they show them not as passive, sinful, shameful, or subservient, but as active, complex, and with minds of their own: “women with a capital ‘W,’” Apostolos Cappadonna told me. She went further: “Yes, it’s an ecstasy painting, but it’s not her moment of transformation. It’s a moment of spiritual encounter… It’s sometimes described as if it were the best sexual encounter… the greatest orgasm you could ever have. It’s aesthetic, it’s physical, it’s sexual, it’s spiritual. You’ve grown outside of yourself to a higher level. It’s not just about being pornographic or erotic. It’s the fact that all of these things come together. Head, body, soul, heart – and she experiences it fully.”

So, while this new gentile may finally correct the gender imbalance in the NGA, this acquisition is more important than it seems, as it changes not only the way we might look and think about mythological and biblical women, but also the female experience in general.

It’s something the Catholic Church finally realized. In 1969, she finally recognized the Magdalene’s canonical definition as a faithful follower rather than a sinful penitent. In 2016, Pope Francis raised her rank to “Apostle to the Apostles,” marking July 22 as her feast day. It seems that even though one institution only allows women in, views are changing. This new purchase—a woman freed from the patriarchal gaze, who exists only for herself, who does not suffer and does not sensationalize—is part of a larger shift toward equality.