Given their power to influence ideas and beliefs, including the cultural reshaping of female identities, works of art can be dangerous. An artist can intend a particular interpretation of her theme or motif when creating a work—and sometimes a moral message. That message is inevitably mired within the culture in which it is created.

However, as time passes, images retain the potential to be seen anew and reinterpreted in terms of later cultural perspectives. The cultural reshaping of Mary Magdalene witnesses her over-two-millennia-long journey through the modalities of feminine passivity, submission, power, influence, and action to one of female agency. This journey is reflected in the variations in her iconography as the Woman with Nard.

Within the borders of these three depictions of feasting are visual echoes of other scriptural meals from the Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes to the Last Supper all of which have eucharistic associations in Christian tradition. However, it is the sacramental implications of anointing in preparation for the anticipated sacrificial death of Jesus that the woman with the jar of nard comes to signify.

Whether this woman is identified by name or not, like earlier generations of Christian believers, we know her by her actions—either of breaking the ointment box over Jesus’s head (Matthew 26:6–13; Mark 24:3–9) or of mixing her tears with the nard as she anoints his feet (John 12:1–8), for she is inseparable from her alabaster jar or box. Under normal iconographic standards, the Christian Church came to know her as Mary Magdalene, especially in works of visual and dramatic art. Sometimes, as reflected in the fifteenth-century illumination featured here, the unguent jar may be absent, but her posture and gestures signify the act and meaning of the sacrament of anointing.

Further, whether appropriately identified or misidentified as the fallen sinner, Mary Magdalene was a popular reference-point for clergy and laity alike once annual confession to a priest was made an obligatory condition of admission to the Eucharist during Lent—a rule promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

The perception of Mary Magdalene as a model sinner, on account of her penitence, was enhanced by her characterization in The Golden Legend authored by the Dominican Jacobus da Voragine (c.1229–98). The chapter on Mary Magdalene solidified her identity as the woman from whom seven devils were exorcized, as the woman positioned at the feet of Jesus which she washed with her tears and dried with her hair as she anointed him with precious ointments, as the forgiven sinner, and as the sister of Lazarus and Martha of Bethany but who took the better part when she sat at Jesus’s feet when he was teaching. 

By the time of El Greco’s painterly interpretations and as perhaps the most flexible of all biblical women in her complex iconology, Mary Magdalene was the female ideal of the contemplative life, given her thirty-three years of meditation and prayer, her renunciation of material goods following her conversion, her evangelization of France, and her retreat to La-Sainte-Baume. She was celebrated as a remorseful forgiven sinner who experienced mystical ecstasy and also as the devoted female follower of Jesus who stood at the foot of his cross. Hers was a quasi-sacramental experience of penance and consecration, and her activities as an anointer offered a model for the incorporation of Christian women into the spirit of Christ through the seal of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.