Noli me tangere

Holbein came to England in 1526 carrying a letter of introduction from the scholar Erasmus. He was leaving a city in trouble. Basel had turned Protestant, altarpieces were being pulled down and burned, and a painter who lived on church commissions had very little work left. This panel is one of the few religious pictures he made after the move, and it is dated to those first English years partly from the wood itself, oak, which he used in England and not in Basel. The subject is the moment Mary Magdalene recognises the risen Christ in the garden and he tells her not to touch him. Behind them Peter and John are still hurrying back from the empty tomb, and two lights work against each other across the scene, a cold dawn coming up over the hills and a pale glow inside the tomb where the angels sit. Nobody knows who commissioned it.