From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
It is not every artist for whom I would climb a mountain, but I found myself near Sainte-Baume, east of Marseille, a week before the exhibition of Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher’s furiously funny and cunningly beautiful textile work The Map (2021) opened in New York and was inspired to carry the coincidence to its conclusion.
The Sainte-Baume cave occupies a rock face at an elevation of 1,000 metres. In this hermitage, according to tradition, Mary Magdalene spent the last 30 years of her life, having cannily sailed to Provence with her persecuted followers.
I hauled my godless carcass up the pilgrim’s route on a cloud-laced August morning. The approach to the grotto, a holy site since the fifth century, is punctuated with devotional markers for parents who have lost children at birth. Opposite a shrine in the lower level of the cave, one wall is covered with small brass plaques, each engraved with a child’s name and one date serving both for birth and death. Many are clustered in groups with a single surname – sequences of late-stage miscarriages and stillbirths.
At the summit above the cave, perched improbably on an exposed limestone cliff overlooking a vista of planes and ridges, is the tiny chapel of Saint-Pilon. The chapel occupies the spot to which Mary Magdalene is said to have ascended seven times a day to pray, borne aloft by angels. Angels not being available to assist with the ascent, I attained Saint-Pilon by the steep and stony path. At Sainte-Baume the Magdalene is revered as a preacher, a penitent and a source of consolation for bereaved parents.
The Map (2021), Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher. Photo: Ros Kavanagh; courtesy Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre
Now on show at the Irish Arts Center in New York, Fallon and Maher’s The Map was originally commissioned by Dublin’s Rua Red arts centre for a season inspired by Mary Magdalene. The Magdalene of Ireland, synonymous with women’s sin, is very different from the figure beloved in the south of France. Embroidered on silk and found cloth (including a frayed tablecloth that belonged to an abusive priest), The Map is martial by association– both a work of fantastical cartography, and a reclaiming of territory.
Aspects of Mary Magdalene’s symbolic universe are re-imagined as geography. Spikenard Lighthouse – named for the unguent used to anoint Jesus’s feet – beams out across Ointment Bay. In paintings of the crucifixion and lamentation, Mary is identified by her red hair, worn loose: tresses of it furl and coil across the top of The Map. A range of volcanoes is named the Seven Devils, for the demons cast out of her. Here, too, are insults, slights, cruelties committed in her name, including Slag Island, where Delilah Drive leads to the Fields of Salome beneath Scapegoat Estate.
The Map (detail; 2021), Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher. Photo: Ros Kavanagh; courtesy Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre
Before The Map, Fallon and Maher worked together on the Artist’s Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, for which they stitched bright silk protest banners calling for a change in Ireland’s abortion law. Throughout the 20th century, the lack of access to legal abortion fed ‘wayward’ young women into the Magdalene Laundries – homes for unwed mothers and other unruly females – in which they were incarcerated and their babies taken for adoption. A panel on The Map dedicated to ‘The Architecture of Containment’ shows the floor-plans of laundries in Dublin, at Donnybrook, High Park (where 155 bodies were exhumed from a mass grave in 2009) and Seán McDermott Street. This last closed only in 1996.
Fallon and Maher told me that there was very little iconography of Mary Magdalene in the laundries – indeed she is little represented in Irish visual culture until the 19th century, when she became a source of painterly fascination as a femme fatale.
Appropriately, one of the first works that greeted me in the Met’s rehung galleries of European painting was also a processional banner, but one from the late 14th century – Spinello Aretino’s Saint Mary Magdalen Holding a Crucifix – commissioned by the Confraternita di Santa Maria Maddalena in Arezzo, a group dedicated to the rehabilitation of prostitutes and housing poor women. This Magdalene is a solemn figure, beseeched by hooded worshippers and exalted by a host of angels. Half a century later, Paolo Uccello paints Mary Magdalene at the Crucifixion, kneeling at the base of the cross with her hair cascading down her back. In Carlo Crivelli’s Pietà (1476) she examines the wound on Jesus’s hand as she weeps beside the Virgin Mary and Saint John.
Saint Mary Magdalen Holding a Crucifix (c. 1395–1400), Spinello Aretino. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
It is in baroque art that her status as a sinner comes to the fore: Johann Liss’s The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1626) presents her bare breasted, turning from the luxuries of the mortal world towards the embrace of a handsome angel. Fluctuations in the Magdalene’s image reflect the compound nature of her story, pieced together from accounts of multiple Marys and unnamed women who appear in the gospels. From the ninth century she was also conflated with Saint Mary of Egypt, a lustful woman who repented and lived as a hermit, her body covered by her long hair. It is in this hairy guise that she appears in Donatello’s harrowing sculpture the Penitent Magdalene (c. 1453–55).
Four years ago, a new plaster sculpture of the Magdalene installed at Saint-Pilon – nude but for long hair, flanked by cherubs – was smashed by devotees. Whether they objected to the sentimental romanticism of the statue, or the muddling of the Magdalene with Mary of Egypt, is not recorded. Either way, their motivation must have been keenly felt: it’s a long climb for an act of vandalism.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.