Christ appears to Mary Magdalen

The moment is Easter dawn, just outside the empty tomb. Mary Magdalen has come to tend the body of Christ and finds him standing before her alive, though at first she takes him for the gardener. That confusion is why painters, Lavinia Fontana among them, give the risen Christ a broad hat and a spade or hoe, the tools of a man who works the ground. Here he draws back from her outstretched hand with the gesture the scene is named for, noli me tangere, do not touch me. Fontana signed and dated the canvas in 1581. She worked in Bologna and was one of very few women of her time who ran a busy painting workshop and supported a household with commissions. Behind the two figures the garden opens into a quiet morning landscape, the light low and new.