Lavinia Fontana’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman Reconsidered

Lavinia Fontana’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman Reconsidered: The Samaritan Woman Identified as Mary Magdalene James David Audlin From the upcoming third edition of The Gospel of John Restored and Translated, to be published in approximately twelve volumes by Editores Volcán Barú, copyright © 2013-2025 by James David Audlin. Shared here by permission of the publisher, Editores Volcán Barú. All rights reserved. All images are in the public domain. Though sadly far less celebrated today, Lavinia Fontana is without doubt one of the greatest painters in at least the Mannerist period, and indeed in my view in all time. Not only is her Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1607) exquisitely painted, a masterpiece of brushwork, of color, of composition, but, even in the context of her other high accomplishments, Fontana provides us here with a masterpiece charged with exceptionally palpable erotic tension. Earlier in this work I discussed several works by male artists also treated by Leo Steinberg (The Sexuality of Christ and Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion), all of them invoking the sexual tension with the use of nudity and bodily signs of arousal. However in this Biblical encounter Fontana falls back on none of these props, and yet she realizes an intense sensual and emotional drama at least equal to that in Titian’s Noli me tangere even though her two figures are fully clothed and not even close to physical touch. How does she manage this feat? Both Jesus and Mary (and given this powerful erotic element I assume Fontana understood the Woman at the Well to be Mary) are oblivious to how she has raised up her pot filled with water and put on a stone shelf, apparently forgetting to pour a cup of water for him. They are oblivious to the fact that Jesus has no cup in his outstretched hand to receive such a gift of water. They are oblivious to how Mary’s left hand has arisen as if of its own accord and is moving forward toward Jesus’s own hand, open and upraised, ready to embrace it. They are caught in this moment, this “eternal now”, as Tillich calls it, unable to do anything but stare at each other overwhelmed by the sudden realization that their destinies are to be forever joined. A film is unable to suggest this “eternal now”, only a painting can can do so. This couple has fallen under the spell of love, and they can do nothing but gaze at each other with profoundly intense longing to close the gap between them, to join their hands together in marital union. We can also look at their two hands in terms of Italian hand gestures, a thought that sends me scurrying back to Andrea de Jorio’s masterful 1832 volume on the subject, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (The miming of the ancients investigated in Neapolitan gestures). This work suggests that Jesus’s palm-up hand at waist level indicates – and de Jorio quotes from Petronius – Protendo igitur ad genua vestra supinas manus, petoque, et oro (“so I hold out my supine hands to your knees and I beg of you”). Of course this could merely be a visualization of Jesus saying in John 4:7 “Give me to drink”, except that my analysis of the Galilean Aramaic a few pages back concludes that the phrase is more likely “Come to me” with, I theorize, Jesus addressing her in the final word as “priestess”, with no mention of water. The painting accords with the Galilean texts. The bucket with its spout is sitting on a shelf. There is no cup in sight. And Mary’s hand-gesture reply, with palm down and fingers outspread, is according to de Jorio to say “We may proceed, but not too hastily.” If all this is so, then what Jesus is requesting is surely the consummation of the marriage by means of the physical intimacy that indeed the Galilean text go on to narrate: In the painting it is as if Mary means to say “We may proceed, but here where we are, beside the village’s water source, is hardly private, and besides your disciples could come back here at any moment!” And as if in support of this sense I note that Fontana has painted in three figures near the buildings in the background, and all three are looking their way. Fontana’s most brilliant touch was to add glints of bright light to Jesus’s eyes. He gazes at Mary with a glowing intensity of love that, yes, even Titian fails to achieve. Indeed, that light cannot come from the sun; the sky over the couple is overcast; it can only come from the Magdalene herself – just as it does in El Greco’s The Risen Christ Appears to Mary, which also has their hands seeking each other but not yet quite fully clasped together. Indeed, a careful look at the lights and shadows on Jesus’s skin and clothing and on the water pot all suggest the same thing – Mary as the luminescent source in this lovely painting. Dov A Treiman points out that Fontana has Mary’s feet sandalled, while Jesus’s are bare, even though by the gospel account he has just walked a long way to reach this meeting-point. Treiman suggests that this may be the artist’s poetic anticipation of John 12:3, in which Mary anoints Jesus’s feet. It is quite as if Lavinia Fontana embraced the rumors that, in the face of official suppression, had persisted to her own time (and to ours as well), which I conclude herein by textual analysis are correct – that this Samaritan woman is indeed none other than Mary, and that this moment is when by Judæan custom they confirm and ratify their engagement and become truly married. Was she capable of such an astounding painterly realization? First I note that this canvas is kin to her Wedding Feast in Cana, which is considered beginning on page Error! Bookmark not defined.. The female faces are very similar. Both have the requisite red hair, though in the latter work Mary’s head is covered because she is now in Cana a properly married lady. Jesus in the Samaria canvas is garbed in a red tunic with a blue cloak, and these colors are reversed in the Cana work. Mary grasping the water pot is dressed in beautiful finery that suggests her role as high priestess and her status as up to this moment an unmarried woman, but still her bodice is red and her cloak blue, just as at the wedding feast she is in a red tunic and blue cloak. I will conclude in my analysis of the Cana painting that its Mary is the Magdalene, not the Madonna, and I reach the same conclusion with this depiction of the Samaritan woman. And I note severally a number of factors that lend support to my conclusion that Fontana has Jesus and Mary in this work at the point of physically confirming their union. What evidence exists (according to Caroline P. Murphy in Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna) strongly suggests that Lavinia Fontana “was well educated for a woman of her time and social status.” She was extremely fortunate to have been taught by her father, a superb painter himself. And her husband, Gian Paolo Zappi, Count of Imola, sought no dowry but rather fully supported her career as her agent and even sometimes her assistant, painting relatively simple things such as curtains. She was the first woman elected to the prestigious professional artists in Rome, l’Accademia di San Luca – a significant privilege that even Caravaggio was not afforded; she was made Portraitist in Ordinary (principal painter) to Pope Paul V; and she was also honored by a medallion cast in her honor. During her lifetime she was also a wildly popular artist, the first woman to have a successful professional as such. She was especially venerated by women, who begged for her attention and named their daughters for her. She was the first female artist in Europe to paint the female nude, and even was criticized for daring to use nude models, one of whom may even have been herself. And she was unafraid to present frankly erotic scenes; her Venus and Mars serves as an example. In sum, she was an iconoclast and something of a feminist in her time, fully capable of realizing that Mary and Jesus were a wedded couple, and clearly endowed with the courage to depict such a union. It is not irrelevant that her remains lie in the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, as do those of Caterina da Siena who likewise extolled the Magdalene as bride of Jesus, and which features a fresco discussed previously that astonishingly presents Mary as the Magistra Apostolorum.