Parting (Museum of Suspense II)
Giovanni Lanfranco, Mary Magdalene Raised by Angels, c. 1616, oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.
Ale Nodarse April 22, 2025
A woman is borne aloft. She is called Mary Magdalen, and she floats. She rises naked, appearing, for a moment, like an air bubble brought to the surface of a stream. She does not move, but the artist clarifies her upward trajectory. One of three angels pulls at the cloth Mary sits upon to raise her up, up and away.
This seventeenth-century Magdalen (c. 1616) by the Italian painter Giovanni Lanfranco might count as one portrait of Mary Magdalen among many within the Museum of Suspense. Lanfranco himself was an eclectic observer of earlier painting. Merging disparate styles, his composition here draws readily upon medieval precedents. The image of the floating figure had stemmed from a thirteenth-century collection of saint’s lives, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), which included details of Mary Magdalene’s life after the death of her beloved Christ. This Mary chose to live in solitude and, as the Legend describes, forsake all food and drink; and yet, “every day she was lifted up in the air of angels” and given incorporeal sustenance. This continued until her death when her soul, as opposed to her body, parted indefinitely. In the 1616 canvas, Lanfranco leaves us to wonder if Mary ascends for a first or final time. His picture prompts us, in other words, to ask when.
The picture is, of course, a material thing. Made of wood, canvas, and oil, it remains on the side of the ground. Likewise, the artist’s vision is a mortal one. Yet, just as suspension challenges the division between ground and sky, so too does Mary’s body — liable, as it now appears, to drift. The artist’s vision entails a similar movement. To paint the miraculous, one wonders, did Lanfranco think of more “quotidian” blues. Did he once open his eyes under water? Did he look at the sun through the lens of the sea? Did he catch the billow of cloth in a wave?
On the lower right of Lanfranco’s canvas, two small figures look up.
Our own mortal vision is set within the work. We are consigned to a lower realm. We are like them: those figures who, to the right of the dark outcropping, peer up. As one figure points and as the other raises a hand to forehead (as if to guard his vision from excessive light), we may recall when we have looked similarly to the sky above. The distance of cosmic events unfolding there, above — whether eclipse or ascension — may remind us of our proximity here, below. For a moment, the painting’s suspense might remind us of our shared conditions: of gravity, of departures, and of the periodic longing to overcome them both.
In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene carries news of Christ’s ascension. “Do not cling to me,” Christ tells her, “for I have not yet ascended […].” Christ continues with an instruction to go to the apostles, “to go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”¹ As the chosen messenger, Mary becomes another apostle. The painting of her departure may be said to recollect this moment, as her temporary ascension mirrors that of the man she once knew and sought to grasp. Apart from one’s own beliefs, the image finds poignancy in this lingering of leavings. Mary’s stance remains open. Her eyes turn skyward, and her arms outstretch — less certainty and more question. That question may be a familiar one: Who do we look up to when we look up and away?
I doubt the poet Mary Oliver sought to paraphrase Christ’s words within John, but a shared concern resides within her own instruction. “To live in this world,” she writes:
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.²
In the moment of the Magdalene’s parting, there is something of all three. The time that comes — the time to “let it go” — has not yet arrived. It remains instead the painting’s question: a when which is also our own.
¹John 20:17, English Standard Version.
²Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” American Primitive (Back Bay Books, 1983)
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
