Picturing the 'Pregnant' Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430-1550

Addressing and Undressing the Sinner-Saint

Penny Howell Jolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351911238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

Examining innovations in Mary Magdalene imagery in northern art 1430 to 1550, Penny Jolly explores how the saint's widespread popularity drew upon her ability to embody oppositions and embrace a range of paradoxical roles: sinner-prostitute and saint, erotic seductress and holy prophet. Analyzing paintings by Rogier van der Weyden, Quentin Massys, and others, Jolly investigates artists' and audiences' responses to increasing religious tensions, expanding art markets, and changing roles for women. Using cultural ideas concerning the gendered and pregnant body, Jolly reveals how dress confirms the Magdalene's multivalent nature. In some paintings, her gown's opening laces betray her wantonness yet simultaneously mark her as Christ's spiritually pregnant Bride; elsewhere 'undress' reconfirms her erotic nature while paradoxically marking her penitence; in still other works, exotic finery expresses her sanctity while celebrating Antwerp's textile industry. New image types arise, as when the saint appears as a lovesick musician playing a lute or as a melancholic contemplative, longing for Christ. Some depictions emphasize her intercessory role through innovative pictorial strategies that invite performative viewing or relate her to the mythological Pandora and Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism. Throughout, the Magdalene's ambiguities destabilize readings of her imagery while engaging audiences across a broad social and religious spectrum.

Chapter 1 The “Pregnant” Magdalene, Bride of Christ: Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross

1.1 Dirk Bouts, Crucifixion, ca. 1455. Granada, Capilla Real. (Photo: © IRPA-KIK, Brussels)

Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (Plate 1), commissioned about 1435 for the chapel of the Crossbowmen’s Guild in Leuven, includes perhaps the best known and certainly the most often copied image of Mary Magdalene created in fifteenth-century northern Europe.¹ Her tearful pose, with clasped hands and spread elbows tensed like the crossbow in the altarpiece’s fictive tracery behind her, arched back and bent knees, reappears in numerous later Flemish and German images. Her figure aligns with traditional elements of the saint’s well-established cult: her suffering, tears, and penance, all expressions of late medieval interest in encouraging affective devotion. Even though this pose elicited much attention from her fifteenth-century audience and still intrigues her modern one, a key element in Mary Magdalene’s clothing remains unexplained: why does she appear with spreading laces, a fifteenth-century visual convention signifying pregnancy? Rogier van der Weyden here uses a rhetoric of dress to explore and popularize a new visual type unrecognized by previous art historians: the metaphorically pregnant Magdalene.

The Magdalene’s symbolic pregnancy is not, of course, a physical condition; rather it functions as an analogue for her conversion, her transformation from wanton prostitute to Bride of Christ, filled with redeeming grace. Laboring below the cross, she represents the ideal archetype for repentant sinners, offering hope of redemption to even the worst of them. The visual clues “read” by the original audience, which would have reassured them of the Magdalene’s efficacy as both model and intercessory advocate, appear among these most mundane elements of dress: her gown’s spreading laces and her clasped belt (Plate 2). They mark her body as both penetrable and protected—paradoxically open to carnal embraces and to divine grace, yet also guarded by her divine Bridegroom—and express one of the most significant aspects of her cult: her fluctuating nature that embodies oppositions. While sixteenth-century artists’ means of signaling this permeability and fluidity will metamorphose as dress fashions and audiences change, her body will remain available voyeuristically to viewers, dangerously expressing carnality and desire even while offering the promise of salvation.

While it may seem remarkable such small details of dress could carry significance, the visual evidence provided by works already acknowledged as influenced by Rogier’s Descent from the Cross is particularly striking. For example, in Dirk Bouts’s ca. 1455 triptych in Granada, the Magdalene grasps the cross between her legs in the left wing Crucifixion (Figure 1.1); in the central Deposition (Figure 1.2), she reaches tenderly towards Christ. Surprisingly, her dress changes between these two scenes, even while that of others remains constant. In the Crucifixion, she wears a white garment with red sleeves; her dark blue outer gown slips to the ground. However, in the adjacent Deposition, her now bright red garment highlights her presence, and its side closure has loosened to reveal a white undershift and low-slung belt beneath the spreading lacing. Comparison with Rogier’s Leipzig Visitation of ca. 1435-1440 (Figure 1.3) reveals that Bouts based his Magdalene’s pose and dress on Rogier’s pregnant Elizabeth: both stand in three-quarter view, dressed in red with white veils; Elizabeth leans and reaches out to Mary, while the Magdalene reaches to grasp Christ. For both, zigzagging side laces open to reveal undergowns. Art historians recognize Elizabeth’s open lacing as signaling her pregnancy, yet they have failed to assign such significance to the Magdalene’s laces.

1.2 Dirk Bouts, Crucifixion, ca. 1455. Granada, Capilla Real. (Photo: © IRPA-KIK, Brussels)

1.3 Rogier van der Weyden, Visitation, ca. 1435-1440. Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste. (Photo: bpk, Berlin/Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig/Ursula Gerstenberger/Art Resource, NY)

1.4 Petrus Christus, Lamentation, ca. 1455. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

In Petrus Christus’s ca. 1455 Lamentation (Figure 1.4), the Magdalene, seated at the far left, presses her hands together in a posture of grief also derived from Rogier’s Prado Descent. She, too, wears a garment that splits open: red lacing loosens from the neckline of her dark blue undergown to her lower abdomen as the garment pulls open over her womb, revealing her white undershift. Similarly a fifteenth-century French Book of Hours depicting the Doubting of Joseph (Figure 1.5) signals the Virgin’s pregnancy by the widening, white slit evident over her womb. Though these are clearly analogous figures, the Magdalene’s open laces have largely remained unremarked. While Lorne Campbell suggests the Magdalene is so distraught she has neglected to close her dress, this explanation would hardly apply to the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth, or Anna, all of whom, as we shall see, are dressed similarly to denote their gravid conditions.²

1.5 Doubting of Joseph, Book of Hours, fifteenth century. Paris, BnF MS lat. 1174, fol. 69r. (Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Marks of Pregnancy

These loosened laces—I will call them maternity laces—mark Bouts’s and Christus’s Mary Magdalenes as pregnant; in both cases, however, these are spiritual pregnancies. This study, in fact, grew out of a project focused on physical pregnancy: how do fifteenth-century northern artists depict pregnant women, given that in this time period the ideal female form is generally large-bellied and thus, to many modern eyes, already appears pregnant?³ Simply representing women as pear-shaped, with no other indicator of pregnancy, was unreliable, except in scenes like the Visitation, where the well-known narrative established their gravid condition. Therefore artists established visual conventions to clarify when women were indeed pregnant. We find this visual sign system documented most reliably in images of St. Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary, for most examples of physical pregnancy in fifteenth-century art appear in Visitations, although the gravid Virgin appears elsewhere, including the already-noted Doubting of Joseph, the Marriage of Mary and Joseph, the Journey to Bethlehem, and devotional images of the Madonna of Hope.⁴

1.6 Erfurt Master, Joseph’s Doubt, ca. 1400. Berlin, Staatliche Museen Gemaldegalerie. (Photo: bpk, Berlin/Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Joerg P. Anders/ Art Resource, NY)

Northern artists developed several visual signs to indicate pregnancy. Gesture is one common device used throughout fifteenth-century northern art: the gravid woman’s hand and / or that of another person, placed on her fertile belly, signals her special state by calling attention to the womb and the child inside. Elizabeth and Mary frequently caress each other’s wombs, Joachim touches Anna’s belly at the Golden Gate, and Joseph points to or touches his young bride’s abdomen when he recognizes her condition (Figures 1.3, 1.5, and 1.7).⁵ Creative acts generally associated with women, including spinning and weaving, can metaphorically signal the procreative nature of pregnancy, as in the Erfurt Master’s Joseph’s Doubt (Figure 1.6), where the pregnant Mary sits, legs spread wide, holding a distaff in one hand and spindle in the other, while her manufactured thread—the thread of life— falls across her womb, the external act of creativity echoing the internal.⁶ Some examples mark her abdomen with a cross or, as in Figure 1.6, a tiny Christ in a rayed mandorla; Germanic artists typically prefer this last device, most commonly seen in Visitations, of depicting an infant as though visible and glowing within the womb. Particularly appropriate for holy pregnancies, this convention focuses attention on the divine nature of the conception even while the mandorla shape recalls a vaginal opening.⁷

By the 1430s, loosened front and/or side laces appear with increasing frequency as markers of pregnancy in art; based upon real practices,⁸ they nonetheless form part of a conventionalized rhetoric of dress.⁹ Not specifically maternity clothing, in the modern sense of wear purchased exclusively for use during a woman’s term, these depicted garments are modifications of women’s normal undergarments, unlaced to accommodate growing wombs. Fifteenth-century clothing generally consisted of layers.¹⁰ Prosperous women began their dressing with linen breeches or braies, followed by a white linen shift.¹¹ On top of these they wore a short-sleeved kirtle (cote or cotte), a close-fitting and typically laced undergown, usually of wool and sometimes decorated with a band of fur at the hem. Normally, the kirtle’s lacing was loosened to pull the garment over the head, then tightened once on. Separate, decorative sleeves could be attached to this undergown with straight pins or laces. Finally came an outer gown of plain-colored wool, trimmed and often lined with fur; in the fifteenth century this outer garment was commonly sharply tailored with pipe pleats and a deep V-neck, and tightly belted either at the waist or below the breasts, depending on fashion. Thus the pregnant women we are considering are generally depicted with exposed undergowns that open at either the front or sides. While both styles were useful for pregnancy, front laces were particularly practical for new mothers, because following birth, they could unlace the bodice in order to nurse.

Rogier van der Weyden helped popularize the depiction of maternity laces in fifteenth-century northern art, for among the earliest examples are his Leipzig and Turin Visitations from the early 1440s (Figure 1.3); he even thus highlights Elizabeth’s condition in the tiny archivolt relief of the Visitation in the leftmost panel of his John the Baptist Triptych.¹² Widely influential upon numerous later Flemish and German artists, these paintings also model the depiction of maternity apparel. This is particularly noteworthy because Rogier’s teacher Robert Campin appears never to have used the lacing motif, nor does Rogier’s co-worker in Campin’s shop, Jacques Daret, use it in his 1434-1435 Visitation from the Arras Altarpiece that some scholars believe was an important source for Rogier’s Turin and Leipzig panels.¹³ As will be discussed below, Rogier is unusually interested in calling attention to Elizabeth’s condition when she hails Mary and recognizes her as the Mother of God and Christ as the Son of God.

For later northern artists, matern...