Mary Magdalene and the Radical Act of Reading

Iommelli, Antonio. “Mary Magdalene reading.” copy after Allegri Antonio called Correggio, inv. 126, Galleria Borghese, 2023.

Source: Melissa Rampelli, personal photograph, 2025

Calm and contemplative, Mary Magdalene reclines on a floor of packed dirt and stone, propping herself up on her right elbow, temple cradled in palm, to read. Though we cannot read the text of her book, it is a robust tome, perhaps of scripture.

Beside her elbow rests a small jar of her iconic anointing oil. Nothing and no one surrounds her except darkness, making for a solitary scene.

With her breasts, arms, and feet bared and her auburn hair cascading down over her arm, Mary evokes a voluptuous sensuality we later see in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite figures. But Correggio’s Mary Magdalen painting (circa 1530) resists oversexualizing the penitent figure, making Mary’s act of reading in quiet repose the focus of the painting.

In the early 16th century, perceptions of women’s minds were shaped by a confluence of Aristotelian philosophy, humoral theory, and moral prescriptions of humanists. Aristotle’s model cast women as inherently less rational than men and fitted for the realm of the body rather than of the mind. Humoral theory reinforced this, associating women’s cold and moist constitutions (as opposed to men’s hot and dry constitutions) with emotional impressionability and instability.

In the same decade that Correggio painted his Mary Magdalen (alternately spelled "Magdalene" and "Magdalen"), humanist Juan Luis Vives wrote De Institutione Feminae Christianae (The Instruction of a Christian Woman) for Princess Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Vives’s work was radical in its advocacy of female literacy in Scripture and moral philosophy, but his advocacy was nonetheless shaped by the judgment that women’s minds were fragile, impressionable, and in need of guidance.

Vives warned that a woman “ought nat to folowe her owne iugement” (not to follow her own judgment), lest she “take false for true, hurtful in stede of holsome” (take false for true, hurtful instead of wholesome). Reading, in his view, was to be supervised and confined to pious works; romances, love poetry, and “bokes writen… for idel men & womē” (books written for idle men and women) were likened to “firebrondes… wher wt ye fire may catche a man al to gether & more hote” (firebrands...where the fire may seize a person entirely and burn still more fiercely).

Vives stressed that “chastite in bryngynge vp a woman requireth the most diligence” (chastity in bringing up a woman requires the most diligence), framing intellectual cultivation not as an end in itself but as a safeguard for virtue and marriageability. In this climate, a painting of a woman reading alone quietly unsettles the gendered hierarchy of intellect by granting her an interior life not mediated by clerical or marital authority.

During the Catholic Counter-Reformation, art began to figure Mary, the “fallen woman,” as not only repentant but also contemplative. Yet this shift in art did not necessarily signal a shift in social perceptions in women’s everyday lives. As Virginia Woolf notes in A Room of One’s Own, art and literature’s celebration of women’s psychological depth and complexity often went unmatched in everyday life, giving birth to woman as “a worm winged like an eagle.”

In the context of the early modern period, when reading was seen as morally dangerous and women were culturally perceived as lacking the complex psychological interiority saved for their more rational male counterparts, Correggio’s painting imagines what a woman’s mind and thinking could be: introspective, analytical, and self-directed.

Baglione, Giovanni. Maria Maddalena (Mary Magdalene). 17th century, oil on canvas, 44.5 × 60 cm. Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

Source: Melissa Rampelli, personal photograph, 2025.

Mary’s calmness is remarkable, as it offers a counter-narrative to the hysterical woman, in general, and the self-punishing penitent “fallen woman,” more specifically. Baglione’s Maria Maddalena offers a useful contrast.

In Baglione’s close-up of Mary, she clasps her hands in prayer and looks askance up to heaven in pleading supplication with tears streaming down her cheeks. Her loose hair is frizzy and disheveled. A large book remains closed in the lower right corner, suggesting the symbolic presence rather than active reading of Scripture, and a skull atop the book hints at time and perhaps the symbolic death of Mary’s once “fallen” ways.

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Mary’s tears in Baglione’s artistic vision more so match the performative, emotional element expected of Mary’s repentance and of women in general. We are invited to empathize with her overwhelming sense of remorse.

Correggio’s Mary, on the other hand, suggests that emotion, such as remorse, can be internalized and quietly felt rather than performative. Emotion can go hand in hand with, rather than eclipse, quiet thought and cognition.

Mary’s solitude is also notable, as it signifies her control over her own thoughts and narrative. Mary’s presence in a cave-like setting is fitting with her storied hermitic lifestyle, but here her solitude does not appear as a punishment.

In the early 16th century, Vives encouraged a woman’s father and friends to oversee her reading and determine whether she “maye be kepte from all redynge” (may be kept from all reading) if they do not approve of her choices. With no angels or other religious figures to guide her repentance, Mary engages alone in her self-study—and with no priests to interpret the Scripture for her, Mary shines as a beacon of literacy and critical thought. Her process of change is self-directed and internal.

This stands in defiance of Vives’s instruction that a woman “ought nat to folowe her owne iugement” (ought not to follow her own judgment) and should instead consult “wyse and sad men” (wise and sad men) to discern what was safe to read. In Correggio’s image, reading is a small and quiet but potent act of reflection, agency, and self-cultivation that runs counter to the recommended supervised piety of the time. That Mary remains composed and integrated suggests that a solitary, reading woman is not a dangerous figure.

Correggio’s frame holds space for Mary’s interiority alongside her voluptuous body, thereby acknowledging and resisting archetypes of mind versus body, the cerebral versus the sensual. The mind-body divide was a consistent point of tension through the early modern period, with women often relegated to the sphere of the body.

As a “fallen woman” in society’s eyes, Mary would have been especially sexualized. But while her semi-nudeness may recall her past, no one watches her in this image, and her body and beauty are not a spectacle for the male gaze. Her pose is not erotic but reclusive and relaxed. Her sensuality, like her emotion, exists alongside rather than in opposition to her intellectual and spiritual life.

Correggio may have given viewers an image of women’s psychic interiority that broader social thought would not soon match, but the painting nonetheless offers a celebratory early vision of a woman who can read, reflect, process, and heal on her own in a radical act of reading. If the 16th century could not yet imagine such an interiority as common to women, it could at least glimpse it here, in oil and pigment.