The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  Much that is doubtful and evil still clings to me, but what I once loved, that I love no longer. And yet what am I saying? I still love it, but with shame, but with heaviness of heart. Now, at last, I have confessed the truth. So it is. I love, but I love what I long not to love, what I would like to hate. Though loath to do so, though constrained, though sad and sorrowing, still I do love.

  The conflict within Petrarch between the spirit and the flesh was the driving force of his work and gives movement to his Canzoniere, his love songs to the unobtainable Laura. Laura is forever perfect and immutable while Petrarch the lover wavers, his moods alter from passion to repentance as he travels through a range of emotions. All the while she is his constant inspiration, his muse, while for love of Laura he opens and questions and reveals himself, and presents an ever changing interior portrait of himself.

  Petrarch was to enjoy great fame in his lifetime and his poems were widely circulated throughout Europe in manuscript form before their first printing in 1470. The Canzoniere influenced Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio in Italy and parts of it were adapted by Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde around 1385. In hindsight Petrarch’s account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux is said to mark the moment when the Middle Ages drew to a close and a new world opened. He himself was the first to use the phrase Dark Ages to describe those centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a dark age of closed beliefs. From the summit of Mont Ventoux Petrarch looked out upon a vast landscape, the splendour of the natural world, but his greater discovery was the world within himself. In his quest he became a moving spirit of the Renaissance.

  Petarch and Laura serve to illustrate this manuscript page of the third sonnet of his Canzoniere. She is holding the laurel crown; Petrarch was recognised as the supreme poet of love. Tears, usually Laura’s tears, are a frequent motif in Petrarch’s poems, but in this Canzone the tears are his own.

  Petrarch and Laura. The Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons.

  Love found me all disarmed and found the way was clear to reach my heart down through the eyes which have become the halls and doors of tears.

  It seems to me it did him little honour to wound me with his arrow in my state and to you, armed, not show his bow at all.

  Source: Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, translated by Mark Musa, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985.

  But though Petrarch dated his letter 26 April 1336 and gave the impression that he had written it the same evening as he descended from Mont Ventoux, he did not write it until at least seven years later. Possibly he did not even climb Mont Ventoux. In fact far from being dashed off that night, the letter is a polished Latin essay and the circumstances it describes might well be a fiction. But the tension in Petrarch’s mind between the carnal and the divine was real, a tension he exprienced in a heightened form the following year when he climbed to Sainte Baume, to the cave of Mary Magdalene – and which might be the real moment when the Dark Ages gave way to light.

  The Tears of Mary Magdalene

  Petrarch stayed three days and three nights at Sainte Baume and was deeply moved by his imaginings of the remote and solitary existence of Mary Magdalene there. After her sin, he wrote:

  She did not choose to be conspicuous to men far and wide, nor to live in palaces, but fleeing her homeland she came into these regions as if into another world; she persevered in hiding here to the end and had for her home that bare and hollow rock. . . . It is a sacred place, dreadful and venerable, and not unworthy of a visit, even from a long distance. . . . There the sweet and blessed hostess of Christ, living and dying, enjoyed not the services of finely dressed girls but the ministry of obedient angels.

  While staying at the cavern shrine, Petrarch composed a short poem in Latin for his close friend Philippe de Cabassoles, bishop and later chancellor of the Anjou kingdom in Naples. Called Dulcis Amica Dei, that is Sweet Friend of God, Petrarch begins by calling on Mary Magdalene to look kindly on his tears which mirror the tears in which she bathed Jesus’s feet. Jesus’ memory of those tears, and of her clinging to the foot of the cross, and of her ‘tears soaking his wounds’, are the reason why Jesus made his appearance to her after his resurrection. The final lines of Petrarch’s poem turn to Mary Magdalene’s life as a contemplative hermit in her cave, where her ‘hunger, cold and hard bed of stone were sweetened by her love and hope’, and from where she is ‘seven hours of the day borne upwards to hear the hymns of heavenly choirs’.

  In a manner suggesting at once the spiritual and the carnal, Petrarch is calling on Mary Magdalene, who soaked the wounds of Jesus with her tears, to soak his own wounds with her tears also.

  Not that Petrarch is known for this poem nor for his Latin poetry; rather he is famous for his Canzoniere, his 366 love lyrics which have his passion for Laura as their theme. They are personal and private and intense, and all are written in the vernacular, in Italian, considered a vulgar tongue and supposedly not suitable for the higher feelings expressed in Latin. But the tears he shared with Mary Magdalene at Sainte Baume seeped from Petrarch’s Latin poem and saturated his Canzoniere where Laura is all the more desirable for her tears – ‘When my lady weeps, desire fills me to the brim’ (Canzone 155).

  Petrarch’s Laura of the Canzoniere was a new ideal of woman, at once alluringly beautiful and the embodiment of wisdom, who excited the passions and illuminated the poet’s life and art. She became the means to his introspection and self-discovery, and he combined in her the attributes of Venus and Persephone and Athena and Mary Magdalene, the last because in his powerful emotional relationship with Mary Magdalene Petrarch found the closest and most intimate possible contact with God.

  The influence of Laura and the Canzoniere also extended well beyond literature; it had a significant impact on the visual arts of the Renaissance, on tapestries, on sculpture and above all on painting.

  Painting Laura

  Painting in the Middle Ages was religious. Even into the early Renaissance only rarely did artists paint portraits of secular subjects and then it might be a benefactor to a religious institution who would be included within a religious scene, as for example the kneeling woman, probably a donor, in Fra Angelico’s fresco of the Communion of the Apostles of about 1440 done at San Marco in Florence, reproduced on p.97.

  Instead the Church followed Saint Augustine who in the fifth century had argued against images in his Soliloquies. Augustine was a neo-platonist, that is he believed in an ideal, an ultimate perfection, which could not be reproduced. Art could offer only false images, he said. No matter how excellent a likeness it was nevertheless a degraded likeness of the ideal and therefore it was false. In fact the idea of art and artists hardly existed in the Middle Ages; painters and sculptors were largely anonymous craftsmen who devoted their talents to images meant to excite devotion; their job did not include putting forth anything of themselves nor trying to bring their subjects to life.

  Petrarch, who was deeply immersed in the works of Augustine, agreed with this view. He condemned images. Sometimes he even used Augustine’s words verbatim to attack the falseness and the empty pleasure of visual representations.

  And yet Petrarch commissioned his friend Simone Martini, a pupil of Giotto and the most famous Sienese artist of his day, to paint a portrait of Laura. The painting is lost but we know about it because Petrarch refers to it in canzoni 77 and 78 of his Canzoniere and because Giorgio Vasari, a painter himself and the author of the Lives of the Artists, mentions it in his life of Simone.

  Petrarch found his way round the problem of images. The attempt to represent Laura, felt Petrarch, did not result in falseness, rather it demonstrated a yearning to capture the truth of love and beauty though it was a yearning that could never be fulfilled. Even so, according to Vasari, Petrarch found Simone’s painting of Laura ‘as beautiful as he had desired’, and Petrarch himself wrote in his Canzoniere that Simone ‘must have been in Paradise, from where this lady came, and portrayed her in paint’.

  But unlike Dante�
��s untouchable Beatrice in the Divine Comedy, an ethereal creature who consorts with the Virgin Mary in Paradise, Petrarch writing a generation later enumerates Laura’s palpable attractions, her lovely body, her skin like ivory and roses, her fingers soft and long, her tears like crystals, her sighs like flames, her golden hair flowing free in the breeze.

  Palpable she may be but Laura’s earthly beauty is derived by nature from a heavenly ideal.

  From what part of the Heavens, from what Idea did Nature take the model to derive that lovely face of charm by which she chose to show down here her power up above?

  Canzone 159 (translated by Mark Musa)

  For Petrarch beauty is the link between man and the divine, and in writing of the tears in her eyes, her golden hair flowing free in the breeze, he was thinking as much of Mary Magdalene as of Laura.

  Emerging from the Cave

  The legend of Sainte Baume returned Mary Magdalene to the empty tomb, but not that tomb in Jerusalem where she experienced the mystery of the divine, instead a cave in a remote cliff face where she was entombed for her supposed sins. The legend replaces wonder with grief and repentance – sensations easier for the Church to manipulate and control.

  Mary Magdalene’s emergence from that prison began with Petrarch’s visit to Sainte Baume and his love poems to Laura. Where the beauty of women was condemned in the Middle Ages for its association with sin, Petrarch celebrated their beauty for its association with the divine. Throughout Europe Mary Magdalene was still vastly popular as a penitent hermit, dressed in rags or covered with hair like a creature of the wild and hardly human; but over the next two centuries she would be transformed from a grieving, penitent, self-punishing sinner to an alluring, beautiful and knowing woman – even a goddess.

  Mary Magdalene, carved from poplar wood by Donatello in about 1454, is shown as remarkably tall at 6 foot 2 inches (188 centimetres), but ravaged by a lifetime of self-lacerating penance. Her naked body is entirely covered by her long hair, streaked with gold; her skin is brown and leathery from enduring the elements for thirty years.

  Magdalene Penitent by Donatello. Wikimedia Commons.

  The most dramatic and extreme example of a penitent Mary Magdalene was the wooden statue carved in about 1454 by Donatello that stood within the Baptistry at Florence. A creation of the early Renaissance, its genius and power lies in its emotional realism. She is shown as an old, emaciated and toothless woman, her hands seemingly shaking with palsey as she holds them together in prayer, her nakedness entirely covered by her long hair. This is a woman worn down by years of hard solitude in her cave, her soul wracked by penitence, her unfocused eyes searching for salvation. The statue itself has been worn by time and flood but recent restoration shows that it was originally painted and that Mary Magdalene’s hair was red and streaked with gold. Before her suffering she had been a beautiful woman.

  But Donatello’s image of Mary Magdalene as a fiercely devout and determined woman (or as a self-abusing religious psychotic as others would have it) was one of the last to depict her as a suffering penitent.

  Renowned as the supreme poet of love, Petrarch had found a way of combining his Christian faith with his passion for pre-Christian classical culture and had developed a new sensibility through his poetry that slowly began to spread throughout Europe. That sensibility found a response and was further developed in Florence where beauty as the link between man and the divine was the central idea of Marsilio Ficino who in 1459, a few years after Donatello’s ravaged and haunted Mary Magdalene, was chosen by the Florentine ruler Cosimo de Medici to establish the Platonic Academy in emulation of Plato’s original fifth-century BC Academy in Athens. But the immediate inspiration for the Florence Academy came from the Byzantine neoplatonist philosopher Gemistus Plethon.

  In the summer of 1439 the leaders of the Greek Orthodox and the Catholic churches met with each other at the Council of Florence in a desperate effort to unite Christianity, East and West, against renewed aggression by the armies of Islam. The Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus came to Florence in person at the head of a delegation of more than seven hundred Greeks, both lay and ecclesiastical, from throughout Asia Minor and the Balkans. The emperor’s need was to win Western help to save what remained of his empire from the Ottoman Turks who threatened his capital Constantinople on all sides. Their immediate task was to negotiate with their Cathholic counterparts, headed by the pope, and overcome the various theological differences and conundrums that had grown up between the Eastern and Western churches, and, in the course of hundreds of years, helped to drive them apart.

  Ultimately the council proved a failure but its historical legacy was nonetheless profound thanks to the presence among the Greek delegation of Gemistus Plethon to whom an incalculable debt is owed for the progress achieved by humanism in Italy, that is the movement to recover and assimilate the language, literature, knowledge and values of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. In their passion for inquiry and learning, in their assertion of the dignity and genius of man, fellow humanists from Byzantium and Italy brought the Renaissance to full flower.

  The contribution made by Plethon was born out of his despair as he witnessed the dying days of the Byzantine Empire, that is the Roman Empire in the East, the half that had survived the barbarian invasions and had once extended from North Africa and the Middle East through Asia Minor and the Balkans and into northern Italy (the oldest standing structure in Florence in Renaissance times was a Byzantine tower; it still stands there now). For centuries its capital, Constantinople, was the largest, wealthiest, most cultivated and learned city in the world. But with its passing, Plethon feared that the Greeks would lose their civilisation, their very world.

  Yet in its last years and right up to its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453 Constantinople experienced a brilliant renaissance. This revival in learning had started long before the birth of Petrarch in the West and amounted to a greater intensification than ever before in the study of ancient Greek literature, philosophy and science, while in art it expressed a new realism in mosaics and painting.

  Humanism played a powerful role in shaping perceptions of Mary Magdalene. The six Italian humanists in this 1544 painting by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) were not all alive at the same time but all were prime movers of the Renaissance. The two central figures in the foreground are Petrarch (1304-74) who is trying to attract the attention of Dante (1265-1321), who is holding up a copy of his Divine Comedy for his friend and fellow poet Guido Calvacanti (c1255-1300). Behind Petrarch and Dante is Boccaccio (1313-75), the author of the Decameron, biographer of Dante and friend of Petrarch. Behind Petrarch are two men belonging to a later generation, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) on the right who was the founding head of the Platonic Academy in Florence, and on the left his successor Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498). Petrarch and Ficino in particular associated female beauty with the divine and elevated love over sin.

  Six Italian Humanists by Vasari. Wikimedia Commons.

  Byzantium might die but Greek civilisation must not. Plethon had long since come to the conclusion that Christianity offered no solutions, not with its emphasis on sin and repentance; in lectures he gave during his time in Florence he proposed instead the salvation of society through a return to the ideals of ancient Greece, supported by a revived Hellenic religion and an ethical system based on neoplatonic philosophy.

  In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks and an entire civilisation which could trace it roots back to the Hellenistic world of Greece and Rome was lost except for what could be preserved of its teachings in the West. Six years later, in 1459, Cosimo de Medici, who had been inspired by Plethon’s lectures, founded the Platonic Academy of Florence and appointed Masilio Ficino as its head. With remarkable energy and urgency Ficino translated the entire body of Plato’s work into Latin and at the same time attempted a synthesis of Hellenistic thought with Christian belief, a task that brought him very close to condemnation for heresy and burning at the stake.

  Though
Augustine had said that the ideal could never be reproduced, Ficino said that the ideal was love. The relationship between man and God was based on love and man could realise this love through his contemplation of the divine. But also as man found spiritual completion by loving God, so by loving one another people were expressing divine love.

  Ficino called this Platonic love, a term which nowadays is drained of any sensual content, but Ficino did not rule out a carnal, erotic or sexual dimension. Beauty was the expression of spiritual harmony. To celebrate beauty and to love was divine. The monasteries of Florence were filled with devotional images of Mary Magdalene, sinful and grieving and repentent. But humanism emphasised contemplation of God and the beauty of womankind.

  Naked Mary Magdalene

  With the recovery of Graeco-Roman cultural values painters and sculptors turned to the female nude. Most famously Botticelli painted his Primavera in 1482 and the Birth of Venus two years later. Yet within a decade Botticelli had become an earnest follower of the Dominican religious fanatic Girolamo Savonarola who established Florence as a theocracy with himself as ruler.

  Savonarola railed against the Florentines for their sinful ways, their passion for gambling, their perfumes and extravagant clothes, their dissolute carnivals and their sensual pleasures. All of which were destroying their souls and making it impossible for them to enter the Kingdom of God. Prostitutes must be beaten to make them virtuous, he thundered; homosexuals must be burnt alive; the books of Plato and Aristotle must be kicked into the gutter; and all those paintings of voluptuous women must be destroyed. The Florentines must war against sin and live the austere and simple life of the Early Church. And the Florentines must repent.