Artist: Peter Paul Rubens
Date: 1618
Size: 200 x 178 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
The scene depicted is described only in John 20:14-17. After the burial of Christ, Mary Magdalen having found his tomb in the garden empty, mistook Christ for a gardener. Having asked him where the body of Christ had been laid, Christ called her by her name and she then recognized him as ‘Master’. But he forbade her to touch him: ‘Jesus saith unto her Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father …’. Christ is shown as a gardener, with his hand resting on a spade, standing amidst some vegetables; beside Mary Magdalen is her emblem, the vase or alabastron. Beyond to the right, is a town intended as Jerusalem. The one time acting director of the Koninklijk Museum, Jeronimo de Vries (1776-1853), greatly admired this picture, and it was subsequently accepted by Smith.4 But it found no favour with Rooses5 and has been considered a studio work by the museum since 1926. For editorial reasons, it and related works were not discussed by Freedberg in his Corpus Rubenianum volume dealing with the life of Christ after the Passion. Burchard,6 and later Jaffé,7 accepted one treatment of the subject – in small, horizontal format, in the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco – as a work of collaboration between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), though they differed as to dating. In contrast, Van Mulders in a subsequent Corpus volume has recently proposed a version in the Bremen Kunsthalle as the best extant example, dating it circa 1626-30.8 So far as concerns the treatment of the subject rendered in a large, upright format, Burchard was hesitant about the museum picture; he considered that it might be by Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678) and preferred a version he saw at a distance in the Jesuit Church in Brussels, which has been lost sight of since 1973.9 It is possible that this, or more likely the Bremen painting (which is probably dated too late by Van Mulders in the belief that the landscape is by Jan Brueghel II) or if not – as she also opines – a lost collaborative work by Rubens and Jan Brueghel I, is the prototype for all subsequent variations, including the present picture and also different treatments known only by engravings.10 The Rijksmuseum picture is evidently the work of more than one hand. The damaged, much retouched landscape is painted in a manner reminiscent of Jan Brueghel I, and the weakly rendered vegetables and foreground foliage recall the style of Jan Wildens (1583/84-1653). The figures of Christ and the Magdalen are clearly the work of Rubens’s studio, and it is likely that Rubens himself retouched or reworked certain areas, most notably the faces. Thus, the present work would appear to be the only extant example of a collaborative work by Rubens and Brueghel I being converted in Rubens’s studio to a life-size scale,11 in this case fitting for an altarpiece. Maybe this took place to meet a special commission. The figure of Christ recalls the Christ in the Brussels Woman Taken in Adultery last dated circa 1615,12 while the Magdalen recalls the saint in the Munich Christ and Penitent Sinners of circa 1616/17.13 A date for the Noli me Tangere of 1615-18 would seem acceptable. The physiognomy of Christ is similar to that in the Brussels picture and in others executed around this time. As pointed out by Meganck and Dubois, the type is that of the vera effigies as described in the apocryphal Lentulus letter. Rubens made a copy of the divine image which had been honoured by St Ignatius and which was subsequently owned by his friend Johannes Woverius.14 It is likely that the canvas support left Rubens’s studio as a rectangle, and that it was shaped by removing the top corners and a shaped section at the bottom centre to conform to Netherlandish taste for the Rococo perhaps in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.15 The mutilation seems to have been made good by the time of the De Smeth sale in 1809. Gregory Martin, 2022
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