Noli me tangere

Christ is holding a garden rake. That comes straight from the Gospel of John, where Mary Magdalene finds the tomb open on Easter morning, turns to the man standing behind her and takes him for the gardener. Painters gave him a tool to make the mistake readable. Titian and Botticelli put a hoe in his hand. The Aragonese painter this small panel is now given to chose a rake, and set its teeth down in the grass.

The rest of the morning is laid out behind the two figures. The tomb is cut into the rock at the right, with two angels sitting where the body had been. The three crosses stand on the hill beyond, and the walls of Jerusalem run across the middle distance. The Magdalene kneels with her jar of ointment on the ground beside her, hands up, being told not to hold on to him.

The panel is 61 centimetres high, painted in Aragon around 1570, a date the museum offers with nothing documentary behind it. For a long stretch of its life it was catalogued as Florentine Renaissance work, and the name of Jerónimo Cósida, who worked as a manuscript illuminator as well as a painter, came to it late. It first surfaces in the records in 1746, in the inventory of Isabella Farnese's collection at the palace of La Granja, where it is noted hanging by a chimneypiece.