Noli me tangere

The title is the Latin for the words the risen Christ speaks to Mary Magdalene in the garden, telling her not to touch him. Correggio painted this around 1525 in Parma, and he tells the story through a small, easily missed detail. On the ground at the foot of the tree lie a hoe, a long wooden handle propped against the trunk, a straw hat and a white cloth, painted with the care of a still life. Those tools are the reason Mary, kneeling in the yellow a painter of that time gave a courtesan, had at first taken him for the gardener. Christ's own hands are empty: the right arm goes up toward the sky, the left holds her off. The panel had a long journey to Madrid, and the museum has changed its account of it. A cardinal bought it in Bologna in 1598, and by the 1630s it belonged to the Ludovisi in Rome, who were long said to have given it to Philip the Fourth. The back of the original panel carries the brand of Charles the First of England, so the Prado now reads that gift as a copy, and this picture as the one bought in London for the Spanish king in 1650, out of the dead English king's collection.