That Which We Call Ecstasy: On Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalenes
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy could have only been painted by a woman. Other contemporary representations of the biblical figure, rendered almost entirely by men, were largely portrayals of death and penitence. Take Rubens and his double-titled work: St. Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, or, The Death of Mary Magdalene (1619-1620). The pairing of these two states of being within the title illuminates an inextricable connection between them. Ecstasy and death are, in these paintings as in life, coupled parts of a whole. In Rubens’s work, Mary Magdalene is affixed with the title “Saint,” locating the painting post-Christ, venerated, holy. Rubens’s painting captures a scene “in media res”—two angels catching Mary Magdalene as she faints, cast in heavenly light, her skin the color of her oft-mentioned alabaster jar, a rotting skull at her feet. But there’s more to Mary Magdalene than her holy ascension after the death of Christ.
Though like Rubens, Gentileschi’s many paintings of Mary Magdalene also include themes of death and penitence, she represents Mary Magdalene in a more diverse range of states across her oeuvre. Melancholia, ecstasy. Clutching her breast in goldenrod, in lament. Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene is layered, prismatic. Most often in renderings of the saint, she is alone in a setting which is unplaceable, nondescript. Sometimes she sits in a wooden chair in a darkened, unseeable room. She is humanized, deeply and unmistakably eroticized. Gentileschi’s portrayal of ecstasy is fleshier than Rubens’s. In Gentileschi’s painting, Mary Magdalene is not solely her rapture. Rather, all the human phases that precede it as well. Breasts, smirk, cloth, hair, fingernails. Mary Magdalene spreading her thighs. She is not ashamed. She has seen God and knows Him. She sat with Jesus, cleansed him, followed him, touched him, found the stone rolled away.
In ecstasy, the religious and erotic are inextricably fused. In ecstasy, death and life converge: each necessitates the other. Looking at Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene, I’m reminded of fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich’s near-death visions of Christ’s blood seeping from his scalp at her bedside. The way Julian describes Christ appearing to her in Revelations of Divine Love is markedly sensual, physical. The sexuality of being enraptured by God is, in these cases, undeniable.
It’s fitting that ecstasy’s Greek root means to literally “be beside oneself,” as in the soul exiting the body. Rubens wasn’t wrong: death, near-death is a preemptive condition of the ecstatic. But so is the live flesh: its vulnerability to being swept up, its heat, its baseness. The ecstatic is not only saintly, or only beautiful—it is terrifying and visceral. It is depleting and dark. It’s the orgasm, and the feeling your heart might stop while you’re having it, and the awestruck exhaustion that follows. It is no coincidence that the French phrase is petite mort.
Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy (1606) features a similar physical configuration to Gentileschi’s painting of the same figure. His Mary Magdalene is also seated: head thrown back, her fingers laced together and her elbow leaning on a chair. She is placed in a similar dark, unseeable space. But there is a striking contrast in the energy of the two paintings when viewed in comparison to one another. The difference in color is notable for example—in the Caravaggio, the woman is draped in red, bringing to mind all the color’s religious denotations: sin, lust, blood, hellfire, damnation, crucifixion. Of course, the Virgin Mary is also frequently portrayed in red—the pomegranate, the fruit of the resurrection. Mary Magdalene as a subject also holds a duality of sainthood and sin. And Caravaggio’s signature tenebrism holds its own duality of light and dark. Caravaggio’s portrayal is certainly eroticized, but also serves as a subject onto which myriad religious signifiers are projected. That eroticism carries with it some level of symbolic transgression, or holiness.
Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene is draped in lilac and white, a goldenrod fabric at her hem. These colors have decidedly different symbolic meanings, among them: majesty, purity, renewal. Though the physical positioning is similar, the most distinct point at which these paintings diverge lies in the portrayal of the face. The face of Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene can certainly be read as a representation of the physical depletion of ecstasy—her eyes open and rolled back. I am thinking of Locke’s offering in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “…and whether that which we call ecstasy be not dreaming with the eyes open...” And yet, there’s something reminiscent of memento mori—a face suspended in rigor mortis. This again calls back to the duality of bliss and death, those necessary components of ecstasy.
Mary Magdalene’s colloquial and Biblically inaccurate representation as a sexually promiscuous woman gave way to a narrative journey from “sinful woman” to “holy woman” which persists into the present. But Gentileschi’s renderings of the woman are rebellions against the flatness of this narrative. Her Mary Magdalene is sexualized, but not sinful. Gentileschi’s own hidden self-portrait in Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-1613), a visual enactment of her slaying her own rapist, is an example of the rebellious and bold nature of the painter, as well as her use of doubling to illuminate historic and contemporary misogyny and gendered violence. Gentileschi’s invocation of a figure historically characterized as a sinful woman creates a deft visual metaphor between the misogynistic portrayals of biblical figures like Mary Magdalene and the misogynistic treatment of Gentileschi herself.
Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy cranes her neck and laces her fingers over her propped knee. Her closed mouth, so unlike the open mouths of other contorted women in many ecstatic paintings, is nearly a smirk. Mary Magdalene’s blouse is half exposing her chest. Her loose hair rivering down her shoulder and back is a scandal. Her clavicles are canyons. The color of her cheeks and the satisfaction of her shut eyes are palpable to the viewer. In representations of Mary Magdalene painted by men, the erotic serves primarily to illuminate the narrative of penitent, former sinner. But Gentileschi’s portrayal of Mary Magdalene in her paintings exemplifies the subject’s complexity. As rendered by Gentileschi, Mary Magdalene appears to be prone to sensations of the flesh. But she is not solely relegated to the category of a former “loose woman.” Unlike Rubens’s work, Mary Magdalene’s death does not eclipse her ecstatic state. She is permitted to be fleshy and saintly.
Yes, Mary Magdalene is sexualized. She is holy. Her cheeks flushed, blood running up to the surface of skin. One might think the seven demons driven out have returned, ravaged her, ravished her, lips smirking, head thrown back. Mary Magdalene: patron saint of glove-makers. Woman who discovered the vacant tomb. Who dried His feet with her hair—woman from Magdala, woman from shore, from sea. Woman in ecstasy.