Date: 23-04-2000
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

What was it like on the very first Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene found herself face to face with the risen Christ? Titian’s Noli me tangere is a dramatic reconstruction of events described in the Gospel according to St John. Mary Magdalen, distraught at the disappearance of Christ’s body from the sepulchre, turns to find Jesus standing beside her. She takes him for the gardener, until he speaks her name and she suddenly realises who he is. She reaches out to touch him, but, as the Bible has it, “Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my father, and your father, and to my God, and your God.”

Titian took a certain amount of licence as he set out (circa 1510-15) to put flesh on the bones of the biblical narrative. He replaced the original setting in Palestine with a fertile stretch of Northern Italian landscape somewhere in the Veneto; and he recast the heroine of the story, making her a thoroughly modern Magdalen, fashionably coiffed and wearing a high-waisted red dress of the sort deemed all the rage in Venice at the time. 

The artist has painted the moment when Jesus tells the Magdalen not to touch him: “Noli me tangere”. From now on she must love the resurrected Christ not as man, but as God. This is a hard lesson for her. When she was a sinner, the Bible tells us, her sins were of the flesh. Even now that she has redeemed herself her first impulse is to honour his body, as she did once before, when she washed Christ’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. She has come to the sepulchre to anoint his corpse, hence the jar of superfluous ointment in her left hand. But now a miracle stands before her. His flesh is pale. His hands and feet still bear the scars of crucifixion. He is clothed in a garment of radiant white, to symbolise his resurrection. He is not as he was and she has to change too. 

The painter expresses many nuances of meaning and emotion through the gestures and expressions of his two figures. Jesus looks down at the Magdalen with a mixture of solemn reproof and compassion. He leans towards her, even as he shrinks from her actual touch, as if to reassure her that the new and purely spiritual love which she must learn to cultivate will - despite her first fears and misgivings - bring her closer than ever to him. For her part she stretches out towards his body but simultaneously holds herself back, taking in his warning. They might almost be dancing with one another, so precisely has Titian choreographed this drama of mortal and divine love. 

The drama extends to the landscape. The Magdalene’s side of the painting is mundane and down-to-earth. Behind her we see farm buildings and a peasant walking along a path with his dog. Jesus’s side of the painting, by contrast, is a kind of sanctified Arcadia. Behind him we see a meadow full of sheep, making him Christ the Good Shepherd, who has sacrificed his own life to save his flock. Further back, the blue-rendered hills are so much more blue than true aerial perspective would require them to be that they seem like a prefiguration of the heaven to which he will shortly ascend.

X-rays have shown that Titian had a lot of trouble with the composition. Originally, it seems, he had Jesus wearing a broad-brimmed gardener’s hat as well as holding a hoe. He also had him huffily walking out of the painting to the left, away from the Magdalen. “Noli me tangere” can also be translated, more brusquely, as “Do not cling to me”, and perhaps that was the sense Titian had in his mind when he started the picture. Only after much reworking, much moving around of trees and buildings and figures, did he arrive at the apparent effortlessness of his final solution. He clearly came to feel that the story’s essential and encouraging message was one of physical love transformed and transcended - not simply rejected. 

Titian’s painting too has given people solace and encouragement. In 1942, when all the other pictures in the National Gallery were stashed away in a Welsh slate mine, Kenneth Clark decided to exhibit this one painting all on its own. Tens of thousands of people came to see it. The National Gallery – like Christ in the painting – remained untouched by the Blitz. 

But as well as its overt message of hope and regeneration, Titian’s picture also seems to express a profound uneasiness at the heart of Christianity. Suppressed desire for the body coexists here with an equally strong fear of the body. It is interesting that such an acute picture about the Christian distrust of touching should have been created by one of the most frankly sensual and libidinous painters: interesting but not surprising, since the ascetic and the erotic, in the Christian tradition, have so often gone hand in hand.