Noli Me Tangere – “don’t touch me”
Lavinia Fontana
c. 1581

“Noli me tangere,” or “Touch Me Not,” from the Gospel of John, is a very common Renaissance and Baroque subject in painting. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artists depicted it. This Portrait is by famous artist Lavinia Fontana. Lavinia Fontana produced many religious paintings; among her best was this, Noli me tangere (1581). Some of her most famous works are large altarpieces executed for the churches of her native city.

Noli me tangere, meaning “don’t touch me”, is the Latin version of words spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she recognizes him after his resurrection. Mary Magdalene recognizes Christ in a garden and reaches out for him to verify what she believes she is seeing. This portrait could be seen as a story of two parts with upper left side showing Mary Magdalene not finding the body of Jesus and the second part showing her witnessing Jesus’s resurrection. In this portrait, Jesus is represented somewhat as a farmer with a shovel and Mary is shown as trying to reach him.

The original phrase, Μή μου πτου, in the Gospel of John, which was written in Greek, is better represented in translation as “cease holding on to me” or “stop clinging to me”. The biblical scene of Mary Magdalene’s recognizing Jesus Christ after his resurrection became the subject of a long, widespread and continuous iconographic tradition in Christian art from late antiquity to the present.

Paintings like Noli Me Tangere adhere closely to religious ideology of spiritual and social reform expressed through prayer, devotion and contemplation. Analyses of Mary Magdalene’s image in several Renaissance Noli Me Tangere paintings reflect both, actual Renaissance women’s lives and the perception of Renaissance women. Thus, Mary Magdalene represents the dichotomy of woman as ideal and wanton; loving and lustful; forgiven and fallen; exemplary and immoral; chaste and seductive; obedient and willful; and lastly, saint and sinner.