The Woman with Nard

This thirteenth-century manuscript illumination weaves together a number of separate scriptural events in order to point up the significance of the sacraments of anointing and of penance. These two sacraments are in each case interpreted visually with the help of Mary Magdalene.

This is because both of the female figures in the illumination—one standing to pour oil on Jesus’s head and one kneeling in a posture of penitence—are thought to represent the Magdalene. Her double presence also serves to highlight her special significance, as female, for the order of Cistercian nuns for whom this psalter was created.

The presence of these two Mary Magdalene figures combines the various Gospel accounts of acts of anointing which came to be attributed to her in later Christian tradition (Matthew 26:6–13 and Mark 14:3–9; Luke 7:36–50; John 12:1–8).

Standing behind Jesus, the first Magdalene-figure towers over all the men. Her hair is covered with a white coif below the yellow-tinged mantle that envelops her upper body. She holds the bottom of a jar with two hands. Turned upside down, and presumably made of alabaster given its off-white colour, this jar allows the nard to drip onto Jesus’s head (Matthew 26:7; Mark 14:3) accentuating the vertical of the red line on his cruciform halo.

In the lowest section of the illumination—her body extended diagonally and her legs trespassing beyond the scene’s border—the second Magdalene-figure is garbed in a white underdress and blue mantle. Crouching out of sight beneath the table, her upper body reaches across the feet of several men. Her extended arms frame her flowing tresses which cover Jesus’s feet as she uses her hair to wipe the precious ointment and/or the tears with which she has anointed them (Luke 7:38; John 12:3).

Before 1050, Archbishop Hugh dedicated the abbey at Besançon to Mary Magdalene and devotion to her had intensified by the thirteenth century when this psalter was produced. Whether or not identified as the archetypal ‘fallen woman’ of medieval and later tradition, she is named in Luke’s Gospel as the woman from whom seven devils were cast (Luke 8:2), and the Church recognized her as also the ‘sinful woman’ who knelt at Jesus’s feet in Luke 7:37.

She was the classic penitent who symbolized the expanding teachings on the sacrament of penance as well as the virtue of hope.

On this large canvas painted by El Greco, we see a centrally seated man (Christ) and a woman standing behind him in a yellow dress, the frontal tresses of her red hair accentuated by her white veil. As red hair is traditionally attributed to her, this detail invites us to read the woman as Mary Magdalene.

Between them, they contribute to a dramatic vertical division in the composition which extends through the circular table. This is highlighted by the liquid, ostensibly nard, flowing from the jar held in the woman’s right hand and onto Christ’s head. Its downward movement is balanced as the vertical is reinforced by the rising spire atop the dome in the distance.

At the final session of the Council of Trent on 3 December 1563, the document ‘On Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, and the Veneration of their Relics and Images’ was promulgated. The Tridentine declaration defined the two functions of religious art as images necessary for the instruction in the articles of the faith, and the visual narration of the events of Christian history. Any lasciviousness was to be avoided and archepiscopal approval of finished works was required before acceptance.

Here, we see El Greco emphasizing the drama of this scriptural narrative by the way he puts to work a mature appreciation of the emotive power of vibrant colour in his treatment of the diverse guests, and by the way he concentrates light within their circle, while darkness lurks at the margins—perhaps an anticipating echo of a Last Supper.

The Tridentine documents elevated saints as mediators between humanity and divinity when understood to have experienced visionary illumination and/or mystical ecstasy. El Greco made this visible by suggesting what almost seems to be an inner luminosity in each figure, to heighten the devotional intensity of the viewer’s contemplation of them. It is as though they, like Christ, have been ‘anointed’, and the Holy Spirit is visibly at work in their persons.

An accompanying Tridentine emphasis was on anointing as consecration—for example, when used as the seal of chrismation or at burial—and on the close connection between such rituals of consecration and the practice of penance, accompanied by tears of compunction.

In this context, Mary Magdalene stands out as the paradigmatic female penitent whose tears and devotion led to her redemption, as well as being a model for the Christian Church as a whole. 

Mary Magdalene’s role in reinforcing the liturgical and spiritual significance of anointing derives in part from the character of Mary of Bethany at the Feast in the House of Simon (John 12:1–8). Later tradition conflated these Marys, giving the Magdalene a presence at this feast, as is evident in this fifteenth-century illumination. She also appears twice at the bottom of the page in two ‘framed’ scenes between flanking angels—once at Christ’s empty tomb, and once in a Noli me tangere, adjacent to an elegant assemblage of flowers suggestive of the aromatic nature of her anointing oils.

In the principal scene, as also in her kneeling position in the garden of the resurrection and her humble position on the ground by Christ’s tomb, she models the consecration of the body called for by the Church’s teachings on the sacrament of penance. Her prostration at the feast leaves little doubt that her act of anointing Jesus is to be read as an expression of repentance. It also echoes the anointings of kings and clerics, as well as of ordinary Christians during baptism and illness, and at death. The hair with which she dries Jesus’s feet has the red tint that is traditional in medieval depictions of her. 

As the leader of the Myrrophores, the ‘myrrh-bearing’ women, of the Easter narrative (Mark 16:1; Luke 24:1, 10), Christian tradition affirmed that Mary Magdalene took upon herself the task of anointing the body of Jesus the Messiah—the ‘Anointed One’—a second time in the Gospels: post-, as well as pre-mortem.

It is no surprise that this anointing act comes to define her in multiple later traditions. Modestus of Jerusalem (c.603–c.34), for example, promoted the role of Christian women, and especially of the Magdalene, in his ‘On Women Bearing Perfume’. And the sixth-century Arabic Infancy Gospel records how an old woman salvaged the navel string and prepuce of the infant Jesus, incorporating them into the composition of some aromatic oils of spikenard. She instructs her son, an apothecary, not to sell this special jar and its contents to anyone despite its inestimable value but to save it for Mary Magdalene to retrieve for the burial anointing of the adult Jesus. Thus, in this oil, birth and death are combined in a promise of rebirth, as Jesus’s earthly body finds itself restored to a state of original wholeness through the Magdalene’s ministrations.