Titian, Noli me Tangere

Risen from the dead, Christ appears to his grieving follower, Mary Magdalene, in the Garden of Gethsemane. At first she mistakes him for a gardener but then reaches out her hand in wonder. Christ says, ‘Do not touch me’ (in Latin, noli me tangere); it is time for his followers to let go of his earthly presence and await the Holy Ghost (John 20: 14–18). The focus of the picture is on the interplay of gesture and gaze between Christ and Mary Magdalene. We do not know for whom the picture was painted.

This is one of the earliest works by Titian in the National Gallery’s collection. Its high-key colours and the way the figures are set in a natural landscape echo the style of Giorgione, with whom Titian trained. Titian had already succeeded in uniting figures with the landscape five years earlier in The Holy Family with a Shepherd, but here he has done something more subtle and sophisticated – the hills, trees and shrubs play a part in the drama. The intersecting lines of the tree and the hillside draw attention to the line of eye contact between the figures. This was an approach that Titian was to develop further in his great altarpiece The Death of Peter Martyr, completed in 1530 (for SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, but now destroyed), where the trees contribute dynamically to the action.

The figure of Christ is in a graceful and entirely believable sinuous, twisting pose which reveals Titian’s increasing understanding in this period of the nude and its dynamic potential. This must partly have been due to his study of prints of and drawings after works by Raphael and Michelangelo, who each in their way made the articulation of the nude figure and the study of antique sculpture central to their practice.

The group of buildings on the right appears in reverse in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese Gallery, Rome), which is dated fairly securely to about 1514, as well as in his Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) of around the same time. The rendering of Noli me Tangere, however, is particularly evocative in its observation of the tumbling mists and play of light across the fields as dawn breaks. We also see the expressive brushwork and interest in the textural possibilities of paint that became the hallmark of Titian’s mature and late styles. The whites of Mary Magdalene’s veil, of Christ’s flowing burial shroud and his loincloth are subtly differentiated, each rendered with dragged brushstrokes of lead white that catch the texture of the painting’s canvas.

Noli me Tangere probably also dates to about 1514. X-ray images reveal that Titian made numerous changes to the landscape during painting but he never seems to have shown the empty tomb or Calvary – the hill on which Christ was crucified – included by almost all other artists painting this subject.