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Beautiful Mary Magdalene Churches

I find Eastern Orthodox Magdalene churches more interesting architecturally than Western Catholic ones. The one above is in Mikaszówce, NE Poland, near the border with Belarus and Lithuania. The Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the slope of the Mount of Olives, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem is

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Antonio Canova's Magdalene

In Italian it is known as Maddalena penitente and it is from 1796. Above is Maddalena Giacente (Recumbent Magdalene) (1819-1822), which Canova completed shortly before his death, was "found" again 200 years after his death. It was to be auctioned by Christies in 2022 but there has been

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El Greco's Mary Magdalene in Penitence

El Greco's "Mary Magdalene in Penitence" has a nipple showing. It was painted around 1577 shortly after his arrival in Spain, as part of a series (the others are much more discreet). Some critics believe it is a portrait of his mistress, Jerónima de las Cuevas,

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Harry Potter

Rowling makes superb use of medieval and Renaissance alchemy rather than Christianity per se until the seventh book and it aroused controversy among those who saw alchemy as heresy and witchcraft. Those objections now have mostly faded away. The English title of her first book, The Philosopher's Stone,

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Hildegard of Bingen

The most influential religious women of the medieval era worshipped the feminine spirit associated with the Virgin Mary rather than Mary Magdalene. Consider the great 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a contemporary of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Bernard of Clairvaux (both of whom she corresponded with). She founded

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Jules Joseph Lefebvre's Mary Magdalene in the Cave

Jules Joseph Lefebvre's Mary Magdalene in the Cave (1876) certainly prompts the question of what she was doing in that cave. Lefebvre specialized in female nudes. This painting is in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. His best-known painting is surely La Vérité, which shows a naked

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Mary Magdalene in the History of Art

Mary Magdalene has been one of the most popular subjects for painters and sculptors, and their works reflect the tastes and predilections of their time and place. First is an example of Mary the penitent or hermit: Donatello's extraordinary anguished figure of 1453-55 (above), where Mary resembles Christ.

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Prostitutes in Antiquity

Back in the time of Jesus, "prostitutes usually were slaves, daughters who had been sold or rented out by their parents, wives who were rented out by their husbands, poor women, exposed girls, the divorced and widowed, single mothers, captives of war or piracy, women bought for soldiers – in

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Sainte-Baume

The sacred grotto of Sainte-Baume (Grotte Sanctuaire de la Sainte-Baume) is at the foot of a massif a little southeast of the small town of Plan-d'Aups-Sainte-Baume and it's not easy to visit. The grotto or cave is a 45-minute drive southwest of the town of St.

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Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

The town has an official population of less than 3,000 people for much of the year but when it swells to almost 80,000 in May and through the summer holidays, it can become a tourist trap. The Gypsy (Romani) tradition is the most interesting and the most controversial:

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Salome and Judith

Above is a painting of Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, by Titian early in his career, around 1515. Or at least that is the popular view. She appears in a sensual madonna-like pose. An alternative view argues that it is in fact Judith with the Head

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Salome and the Medusa

Caravaggio's Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist was painted at the end of his career, around 1609-1610. He had explored much the same idea in his earlier Judith Beheading Holofernes and David with the Head of Goliath, and his Medusa paintings like this one from

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Strauss' Salomé and Mozart's Idomeneo

More Severed Heads Oscar Wilde died in 1900, but Max Reinhardt staged Wilde's Salomé in 1903 in Berlin to great acclaim, after which came Richard Strauss’ opera of 1905. It still plays to strong interest these days, for example the performances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in

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Terry Jones' Barbarians

Perhaps it's because he was Welsh? Terry Jones of Monty Python fame was scathing about the supposed civilization of the Romans. In Terry Jones' Barbarians, he and co-writer Alan Ereira wrote "We've all been sold a false history of Rome that has twisted our

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The Basilica of Santiago de Compostela

The Catedral de Santiago de Compostela sits at the end of the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James), one of the three main pilgrimage routes of medieval times (more on that here). Inside is the world's largest botafumeiro (second image below), a huge incense burner that

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The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code and its home in Cathar country With Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller, Mary’s legend spread far and abroad, begetting new pilgrimages to Paris and beyond, both secular and religious. In the West she became a metaphor for the modern spiritual woman in search of herself

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The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings is about the renunciation of power, of getting rid of the Ring. Evil must be destroyed - a mainstream Christian vision - and it must be destroyed in England. In Oxford perhaps? Now, I acknowledge that many

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The Lost Tomb of Jesus

In March 2007, the Discovery Channel show produced by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici declared that Jesus’ family tomb had been discovered (back in 1980) and that Yeshua (Joshua/Jesus) son of Joseph, Maria (Mary), Mariamene e Mara (Mary Magdalene), Judah son of Jesus, Jose (Joseph, brother of Jesus), and

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The Scallop Shell

The scallop shell is the traditional symbol for Christian pilgrimages. It is associated mostly with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (the other two main pilgrimage sites being Jerusalem and Rome). The shell can be seen as small badges worn on clothing or on signposts or on buildings

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Titian Red

"Titian red" refers to the red hair in Titian's paintings such as this one of Mary Magdalene, dated around 1532-33 in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence. This pose was one he painted a number of times, as the examples below attest. Titian may have acquired his red

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Vézelay

Vézelay today is a charming hilltop town in Burgundy (Bourgogne) famous for its basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine (Mary Magdalene). It was a populous town in the Middle Ages when its abbey first held Mary's bones (from around 1050) and when it was one of the four starting points in