Oh Mary Magdalene Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan Since Your Lover Man Left You Well-Provided For And I Understand Was The “Fixer Man” To Pave The Way To Your Sainthood

By Sam Lowell

In the nuttier atmospherics of art world, the vast area mostly downtrodden by modern minds who only want fresh material and kinkier fare than medieval paintings, Renaissance noise and Dutch (and, yes, Flemish) turgidity (is there really such a word my spellcheck let it through). I won’t even bother going through all the bad humor produced by average art cellar dwellers who apparently not only have time for the latest novelty in the arts but to write long screeds as well. That bad air courtesy a couple of recent sketches I did trying to honor a guy named Rembrandt, no last name or forgettable in nay case, no last known address, one of those Dutchmen painters although certainly not turgid, well, not as much as some of his fellows on his 350^th birthday. I suppose if I left it at that it would have cut down the venomous cyber-ink and perhaps for the 400^th anniversary I will keep it simple.  

Here is where instinct, DNA, socialization, whatever comes into play. For a certain crowd, and I number myself among them, the mere mention of the name Rembrandt triggers memories of the great art heist of the age, the Isabella Stewart Gardner grab of some thirty years ago where the highlights of the caper were some of Master Artist Rembrandt’s works. Putting those two ideas, birthday kudos and heist, together which I assumed might appeal to the nuttier precincts of the art world, seemed rather on point. What brought on an avalanche of bad noise, bullshit and bent noses was my rationale for taking the two assignments since for the past several years I have only been around the

edges of that sulky art world, mostly as an adviser, mentor, muse to fellow writer and amateur art critic Laura Perkins.    

My so-called bad bad was that I stated, for the record and in public, that as against the sterile cuckoo of that medieval and early Renaissance religious art, you know, ten thousand scenes with Holy Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin Mary, Madonna for the highbrows, Mary, wife, perhaps common law wife in case there were bigamy laws back then, Joseph the cuckooed carpenter out of Bethlehem (or Bedlam maybe), Mary of the ten million sorrows at the end bouncing baby Jesus (or his brother it is not always clear from the artist’s depiction who is who but let’s say mostly Jesus and let the curators battle in out in the pages of Art Today). Better the galleries and chapels are clogged with a virtual travelogue of the ever-growing good-looking, bearded increasingly charismatic and sexy Jesus working the streets with his plainsong and drawing a pretty good response from those down in the mud, down at the base of society. The folks that even today can use a break from the unrelenting misery of everyday life. (It would only be later that the depraved rich Romans who threw the brother up on the cross with a couple of sad sack common criminals, in the beginning mainly mothers and daughters then bigwigs, emperors if I recall would join under the big tent). Less happily about twenty thousand scenes of the Messiah(he was working that scam and bringing in good dough at the end although it did him little good either with the Romans or the guys running the shtetl or whatever they called the Jewish quarters then under Roman authority) going through the last stages of his life from the big orgy Last Supper (“orgy” not my term but taken either from Peter or Paul who were there and there is no reason to question that description since they were running the carnival complete with dancing girls I heard), the road show to the crosses up on Calvary hill and all the doom and craziness that brought down. Finally, about five thousand scenes of the Christ rolling the rock up the hill, getting ready to rise, or rising including a famous scene from sacrilegious German artist, one of the youngers, with Mary Magdalene sharing some last minute affections with the Lord before he heads to see his father, his real father (all these names apply to the same guy, Jesus, okay).       

Okay stuff, scenes to paint during that what did we used to call them in the old days before the revisionists worked their magic, oh yeah, the Dark Ages , if you are stuck in some hick town like Messina wanting to break out to a place like say Rome or maybe Paris, Constantinople or Athens but strictly for the rubes otherwise. And I said so, straight up. What upset everybody’s applecart is when I mentioned the only good-looking woman in the crowd, the whore and tavern B-girl Mary Magdalene (hereafter Mary Mags) and had the nerve to call her Jesus’ woman which I believe Jesus and Mary would have taken as a compliment and sign of respect for their short-term but passionate love affair. Mentioned that Mary Mags when she was working the streets had a specialty, was known as a woman who would wash a guy’s feet (for a fee of course) and that was how she ran into Jesus when he was working Galilee I think and needed some immediate relief for some unknown foot disease (unknown to this day but some random DNA testing of the famous shroud claims psoriasis).        

Anybody with half a brain when you think about it knows that the thing was a natural combination. A young guy starting out in the prophet business with nothing but a few good ideas and maybe a couple of cute tricks like the fishes and loaves gag having a woman work the crowd (as against guys like Peter or Thomas who scared the bejesus out of me when I first ran into them in church as a kid). How could you beat the combination a red-headed, light complexioned woman all dressed in black working side by side with the thief of hearts to put a new religion on the board and grab some quick cash as well. Don’t be afraid to look at the really well-done paintings showing this pair in their heyday (to be discussed more fully in the next paragraph). Especially if you have spent the day at the Met, the MFA, the freaking Cloisters or half of Italy and France and the like and were ready to scream if you saw one more cutie selfie of Mary and baby Jesus being feted by angels, and puttee. If you are ever so weary of one more photo-op of Jesus breaking bread and fish for thousands (not an orgy like the Last Supper by the way although some people got rowdy when they were reduced to hard tack end slices and fishtails when the magic wore off). Or you cannot take one more version of the death agony of Jesus, no known last name, no known last address, hanging with a bunch of ruffians and ne’er-do-wells at the end.

Compare all that claptrap with Tintoretto’s so-called Penitent Mags looking all hot and dreamy ready to wash those Jesus wayward dirty feet and get under some silky sheets with the guy. (By the way and remember this was serious counter-reformation time that “penitent” gag was to escape having this masterpiece burned at the stake by some clown cardinals who wanted the world, the Christian world anyway, to see that she had given up her whoring ways and was like Holy Mother Mary just another miraculous virgin girl). How about that Veronese painting where Jesus works his so-called magic, does some kind of exotic exorcism and wipes away Mags sins while a bunch of guys, some apostles I assume are leering in the background. (Some say Peter, a known woman-chaser and whoremaster before he got religion, had eyed her first, had had his feet washed and expected that she would be his girl except the boss had other plans). More than one theologian, I am thinking of John Paul Lawrence and Lemuel Savage, have projected that baffling scene as the first step in their becoming lovers. Interesting. Better, better for my case for the passionate romance is van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross where Mags is almost prostrate with grief that her man had gone beyond the pale, has left her to the maybe not so tender mercies of the remaining apostles. If those are not real tears of intimate distress I will eat my hat, okay. Finally, and here I am saving the best for last since even total dweebs who hate every last religious painting without fail how about Raphael’s The Deposition where Mary Mags obviously having come up in the world working alongside Jesus who liked to see his women in their best finery is clutching the lost boy’s hand hoping against hope that some of that pillow talk he mentioned after having a few tankards of strong red wine about his resurrection was more than hot air. That he would not forsake her. I rest my case.     

[*There is a very rich history, plenty of data and plenty of theory too around the notion that Jesus and his crew, the Apostles so-called were not lascivious, lecherous, wine-drinking sots chasing after everything in a skirt or whatever was the women’s fashionable grab of the day but a close-knit (meaning closeted) band of what today are called gays but back then sodomites and calamites. Of course, such a theory would blow the top off of my Jesus and Mary Mags torrid if short love affair. Since this piece is about Mary Mags I decided to put this scenario in the brackets as everybody in the West anyway knows that Jesus has gotten all kinds of ink, including now cyber-ink around his heart-rendering story.        

The main proponent, modern proponent anyway, for the homosexual cabal theory is the great if cowardly when the deal went down in Merry Olde England in 1939 English poet W.H. Auden. I believe from his early college years maybe when he was at public school he compiled lists of those in history that he could categorize as being like him, being gay. Later when Auden drew close to guys who were also leftists, usually communists, he described the closely held listings as detailing membership in the “Homintern,” a take-off on Joe Stalin’s Comintern. No question Auden did a great if covert service to help explaining today that gayness did not just start with Stonewall in 1969 but goes back to the earliest times when let’s say shepherds were out on those lonely stretches tending to their respective flocks or Greek intellectuals were tired of their wives and wanted beautiful young men hanging around them in the agora.          

            

Auden, for example, was the one who figured out that Richard II was not sleeping with his wife (a wife in name only to cover his real interests, a tactic used many times in history and not only among the rich and able by even working class and middle class guys who couldn’t take the gaff of singlehood and covered their asses with a brood and a mother hen), that Pope Gregory VI (don’t quote me on the correctness of the roman numerals) had Cardinal Mazzi as his live-in boyfriend (who in turn had a friar named Jonathan as his live-in boyfriend which must have been the subject of plenty of nasty banter among the cardinals and their mistresses, that King James I of English, that first Stuart king of England out of heathen Scotland filled with sheep was more than playing footsie with the pretty boy Duke of  Buckingham. Moving forward W.H. had the goods on Peter the Great, Leonardo, Raphael, the poet James Devine, the novelist John Richardson and many more. Probably the greatest service he did, because he did it well before some guy wrote a whole book on it a few years ago was to have Abe Lincoln’s number, have him down as brethren for his youthful romance, for his sharing his bed with Jack Tilden (and after seeing the real dagger Mary Todd no wonder he kept his options open even in the White House during wartime. Another coup to finish up on his unusually sturdy credentials was dotting the i’s on that decadent Bloomsbury crowd, especially Lytton Strachey.               

Auden, no question, comes with plenty of “street cred” as we used to say in the old neighborhood when he put a circle around the name Jesus and the boyos as certified members of the “Homintern.” But here his usually sharp nose and analysis played him false, especially in light of the new information out of Nazareth that a “diary” allegedly kept by Mary Mags had been found detailing so pretty hot stuff about her and her man Jesus, including a shocking revelation about a son begat by Jesus shortly before all hell broke loose in his case and he wound up sucking air on Calvary. Now this “evidence” is still in the speculation/verification/ DNA testing stage but it rather puts paid to something that has bothered me about Auden’s reasoning for a while.    

The core of Auden’s argument for a closeted gay cohort led by Jesus and adhered to by his manly apostles (not big- time big case Apostles like now when you have to suck up to the memory of one of them at least to get anything done in the Vatican along with fistfuls of cash to get anything done) always centered on two key pieces of information. The first was that the guys Jesus recruited were fisherman, soldiers, college students (although they would not have called them that back then but maybe priests or temple acolytes) and what we today in the post-1960s would call free and easy hippies but then more like master-less men. From those professions and an intimate knowledge of what really went on when guys were out at sea for several days, or confined to barracks, or were so-called vestal virgins, or rogues, almost exclusively men.

Auden concluded from that data that this was clear evidence that Jesus was looking for more than converts to his new wave ideas, you know washing the sins of the world clean, getting everybody’s ass back to the Garden, bringing single father love into play, chasing bad ass moneylenders out of temples and feeding tons of people on simple fare. Especially after a hard day’s work hustling for dough and converts around the various marketplaces where he preached his message. Everybody knows that fisherman, actually seamen in general, out on the open seas are well-known to bundle up together, same with soldiers out on the tramp with skimpy canvas to cover themselves up. College students, or what we call them today at exclusively men’s boarding schools ditto as well as tramps, bums, vagabonds and hoboes under the principle any port in a storm. But see once they get off work, school or the road they are as liable to be chasing wenches like Mary Mags, maybe her younger sister too who was starting to work the streets after Mary hooked up with Jesus and his salvation army crowd and didn’t need to do the street hustle and that ugly washing of feet work she really hated. Soldiers, and this is nothing in their favor, were as likely to rape women and pillage as anything else. Everybody knows, or should know, that drunken college students are as likely to hit Joe’s Tavern down by the river to get at the B-girls as hang around the dorms looking for guys to go the distance with. We won’t even speak of what cleaned up tramps, hoboes, vagabonds and bums are capable of when they have their wine casks full.  

More alarming is Auden’s second premise based on the Gospel according to a guy named Edgar whose main claim to fame is to have “discovered” some passed down accounts by Peter and Paul that the night before they nailed Christ to the cross (I am not sure if that “Christ” alias was the moniker he went by then) there was a totally out of control orgy. From there Auden swings us back to Leonardo’s famous if bogus painting of the Last Supper (remember Auden was the first to “out” Leonardo) where it is all guys getting worked up about a possible snitch in their crowd rather than getting sky high on the latest from the local vineyards. Yeah, Leonardo had it down right for public consumption, for the public of his time who were desperate that Jesus was presiding over what looked to all the world like some kind of facility conference (complete with dinky water glasses and variety store snacks). But all guys looking like they are getting ready to pair off to their respective hovels and hence his erroneous deduction. According to the Gospel according to John which Edgar I think correctly credits after all the noise about some fink in their operation had died down there had been a troupe of dancing girls, “seven veil” dancing girls if you know what I mean brought in for “entertainment.” Girls brought in to serve the wine and cut the bread if you know what I mean by that as well.        

So I will stick with my Jesus-Mary Mags sweetie story for another day. Intriguing, very intriguing is the work still to be done on that Mary Mags manuscript find in Galilee. Imagine the Son of Man begetting a son of man. All the theologians will go crazy. Me, I will just amp up my respect for Jesus’ taste in women.