Noli Me Tangere

Hendrick de Clerck trained in Rome under the Flemish painter Frans van de Kasteele, before moving to Brussels where he worked as court-painter to the Governors of the Southern Netherlands. De Clerck’s work serves as a crucial bridge in Netherlandish painting, between the older influences of Antwerp Mannerism and the increasing significance of the fuller modelling and more dynamic effects of light which the generation of younger artists were increasingly inspired to adopt from their journeys to Italy.

The Noli me Tangere (‘touch me not’) was a popular devotional subject, taken from the Gospel of Saint John. After Christ’s death and burial, Mary Magdalene went to His tomb to mourn Him and found that the sepulchre was empty. Turning away from it in grief, she encountered the resurrected Christ but ‘knew not that it was Jesus’. He asked her ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’ and she, supposing that he was a gardener, begged him to tell her where the body of Christ had been taken to. When He spoke her name, however, the Magdalene recognised Christ, calling him ‘Raboni; which is to say, Master’. The moment of the Noli me tangere followed this recognition, with Christ enjoining her to ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and yor Father; and to my God, and your God’ (John, 20:1-17). In de Clerck’s painitng, Christ is shown raising his hand and leaning away from the Magdalene as she reaches out to touch Him. The painting also includes in the background the moment at which Christ’s tomb was discovered empty. Here the three Marys – Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary Cleophas – are shown being greeted by the angel who sat there in place of Christ’s body. This does not comply the description of the events as recounted in the Gospel of John (in which the Magdalene alone first goes to the tomb), with the three women only appearing together in the Gospel of Saint Mark (16:1). The inclusion of the three Marys at the discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, however, had become a regular trope throughout the Middle Ages of depictions of this moment and it seems here that de Clerck was likely also following the conventionalised iconographic format of such scenes.