Noli me tangere

This is a small painting on wood, 47 centimetres high, and one of the last works by Poussin the Prado owns. He made it around 1657 for Jean Pointel, a banker and silk merchant in Paris who had bought a long line of his pictures and for whom he had painted his own portrait a few years earlier. The subject comes from John's gospel. Mary Magdalene finds the tomb open on Easter morning, takes the man standing in the garden for the gardener, and only recognises him when he says her name and tells her not to hold on to him. Poussin gives the scene two figures and the sepulchre behind them, and leaves it at that. In the lower right corner the panel still carries the Burgundy cross that marked the paintings belonging to Philip V of Spain.