Neither saint nor sinner, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene is electrifyingly alive

Soon to go on display at the National Gallery of Art in DC, it took a female artist to portray the biblical figure not as shamed and repentant but in the throes of ecstatic rapture

A woman knocks her head back. Her eyes and mouth are closed but she is awake. With flushed cheeks, red lips and long, golden hair, she glows from a sharply lit flame in a room otherwise cloaked in darkness. Wearing textures ranging from a lace-trimmed chemise blouse – slipping down her right shoulder and exposing her porcelain skin – to a heavy yellow and purple material, she appears to be alone. Unaware of our presence, she exists in a state of sublimity, but also freedom.

The woman we are looking at is Mary Magdalene “in ecstasy”, painted in the early 1620s by Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian baroque artist famed for her heroic and powerful depictions of mythological and biblical women. Recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, it will go on view – free of charge – from 24 February. While it is, monumentally, the institution’s first acquisition by Gentileschi, it is also a picture that shows the saint “neither repentant nor suffering”, as curator Letizia Treves has written. An important distinction because, for centuries, Magdalene’s image has been shaped not just by scripture, but fabulated and conflated by powerful men.

“The most flexible female figure in Christian art”, as scholar Diane Apostolos-Cappadona told me. Look at images of her and you’ll see a reader, preacher, follower and witness; crying at the foot of the Cross, washing Christ’s feet or looking up to the heavens – repenting her sins with pearl-like tears – and too often conveniently exposing her chest. Sometimes identified by her jar of ointment or red robe (a contrast to the sanctified Virgin Mary’s blue), she is most popularly known, today, as Christ’s lover or a prostitute, despite no passage in the Bible describing her as such.

“The truth is, we don’t actually know who she was,” said Apostolos-Cappadona. “So all these layers of interpretation have fallen on her. And the transformations that she goes through, not just visually but narratively, devotionally, theologically, are as much related to cultural attitudes and theological shifts as they are to belief.” So what do we know?

Mary Magdalene appears in the Gospels 12 times. The first time we meet her she has seven “demons” cast out of her; the rest follow her presence at Christ’s crucifixion and as the first to witness his resurrection. It is she who spreads the “good news”. Her sexual and sinful reputation can largely be traced to a sermon delivered at the end of the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great, who confused her with Mary of Bethany and the “unnamed” sinner who bathed Jesus’s feet with her tears, and dried them with her hair.

Collapsing them into one, Pope Gregory effectively “created” the repentant prostitute – a myth further elaborated by seventh-century theologian Sophronius (who confused her with Mary of Egypt) and the middle ages’ Golden Legend (affirming her as penitent). Artists took note – perhaps her flexibility was part of her appeal – and, in a predominantly illiterate (but visually literate) world, this proved influential. With her “seven demons” becoming the “seven deadly sins”, her dominant story was established as one of sexual fall and subsequent moral redemption – concretised in artistic renderings that still get us to believe these stories today.

From Donatello’s emaciated and skeletal wood-carved Magdalene, weakly clasping her hands together in penitence, to Caravaggio’s 1606 depiction of her drained of colour and on the threshold of death – not to mention Rubens’ semi-nude and possessed Magdalene held up by angels – Mary Magdalene has frequently been denigrated sexually. Dürer’s print showed her coyly pointing one foot in front of another, with a giant halo and mounds of hair draping over her nude body, while Titian’s version looks up to the divine light, glassy eyes intact, and hands strategically placed to expose her breasts from her shimmering hair.

It seems suffering and sexualisation were the dominant poles when it came to representing her: she could warn women against sexual transgression, be the poster girl for repentance while offering artists an excuse to paint semi-nudity masked as piety. The “fallen woman redeemed” endured for centuries – so deeply that the Catholic church named its prison-like institutions that forced unpaid labour the “Magdalene laundries”, which shockingly only closed a mere 30 years ago.

But what if there was another side to her story? What if her tale could be one of spiritual awakening and transformation, in which she was pictured as full of life, delight and sublimity? In other words, what if we viewed her through the eyes of a woman?

This is what Gentileschi does. Her Magdalene is not performing for the viewer, not weeping, repenting, shamed, sexualised or dictating a moral lesson. Rather, she sports rosy cheeks and, as Treves wrote, is “passionately alive … in the throes of ecstatic rapture”. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art, said that Gentileschi “endows Mary Magdalene with an electrifying vitality”.

As I’ve written before, often when women depict biblical or mythological women, they show them not as passive, sinful, shameful or subordinate, but as active, complex and with minds of their own: “Women with a capital ‘W’” as Apostolos-Cappadona told me. She went further: “Yes, it’s an ecstasy painting, but it’s not her moment of conversion. It’s a moment of spiritual encounter … described sometimes as if it’s the finest sexual encounter … the greatest orgasm she could ever have. It’s aesthetic, it’s physical, it’s sexual, it’s spiritual. You are raised outside yourself to a higher level. It’s not just to be pornographic or erotic. It’s the fact that all these things come together. The head, the body, the spirit, the heart – and she fully experiences it.”

So, while this new Gentileschi might finally be redressing the imbalance of gender at the NGA, the acquisition is more significant than it looks, changing not just how we might come to view and think about biblical and mythological women, but also the female experience at large.

It’s something the Catholic church eventually caught up with. In 1969, it finally recognised Magdalene’s canonical definition as a faithful follower rather than a sinful repenter. As recently as 2016, Pope Francis elevated her ranking to the “apostle to the apostles”, marking 22 July as her feast day. It seems that, while one institution is only just letting women in, perspectives are changing. This new purchase – of a woman free from a patriarchal gaze, existing for no one but herself, not suffering nor sensationalised – is part of a greater shift towards equality.