Mary Magdalene: From Papal Prostitute to Feminist Icon

Mary Magdalene has been many women across fourteen centuries of Christian history—apostle, prostitute, penitent, witness, confidante—each version shaped by the needs and anxieties of the era that imagined her. A new exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, opening this month, traces this fractured biography through more than a hundred artistic depictions, revealing less about who she actually was than about what successive generations needed her to be.

The biblical record is spare. The Gospels describe a woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons, who traveled with him, witnessed his crucifixion and burial, discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning, and became the first person to encounter the risen Christ. For this role—the first to see and proclaim the Resurrection—she earned the title Apostola Apostolorum, the Apostle of the Apostles, a designation that placed her at the center of Christian salvation history. But that version of Mary Magdalene did not survive the centuries intact.

Around 600 AD, Pope Gregory the Great rewrote her story. In a sermon that would echo through medieval and early modern Christianity, he merged three separate biblical women into one: Mary Magdalene herself, an unnamed woman described in Luke's Gospel as a sinner who washed Jesus's feet, and Mary of Bethany, who performed the same act. Gregory declared that the seven demons Jesus had expelled from Mary Magdalene represented the seven deadly sins, and he proclaimed her a repentant prostitute. There is no biblical evidence for any of this. The conflation was theological invention, yet it became doctrine. For nearly fourteen hundred years, artists and theologians worked from this false foundation.

Renaissance and Baroque painters—Titian, El Greco, Georges de la Tour—depicted her as a penitent, gazing heavenward in remorse, her loose hair a visual code for sexual transgression. Rembrandt painted her as a witness to resurrection. Max Beckmann, in 1917, rendered her as a sinner. The image shifted with artistic movements and cultural moments, but the core distortion remained: she was the fallen woman, the prostitute made holy through suffering and repentance. It was not until the Second Vatican Council, meeting between 1962 and 1965, that the Roman Catholic Church officially revoked the identification of Mary Magdalene with the anonymous sinner. The correction came fourteen centuries too late.

The rediscovery of the Gospel of Mary—a non-canonical text that portrays her as Jesus's particularly intimate confidante—opened a new interpretive space. Contemporary feminist theology seized on this figure: a woman who knew Jesus closely, who witnessed the Resurrection, who was sent to proclaim the good news. Here was not a penitent but an apostle. Not a sinner but a leader. The shift accelerated through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Lady Gaga portrayed Mary Magdalene in her 2011 music video for "Judas," calling it "the most exciting artistic moment of my career." Contemporary artists began to see in her a woman living on her own terms, answerable to no one but herself and her faith.

The most recent work in the Frankfurt exhibition, a 2025 painting titled "La Sfida" (The Challenge) by Spanish artist Nieves Gonzalez, makes the rupture explicit. Where centuries of art showed Mary Magdalene gazing upward in penitence, Gonzalez paints her looking directly down at the viewer with absolute self-assurance. Her hair, once loose as a sign of shame, is brushed carefully around her neck like a scarf—contained, deliberate, hers. Her body, typically rendered half-naked to signal sin, is wrapped in a thick red down coat. She holds a red skull, that ancient symbol of mortality and transience, but her grip on it expresses not submission but power. Every traditional attribute has been inverted or reclaimed.

In 2016, Pope Francis completed the institutional recognition of this transformation. He elevated Mary Magdalene's liturgical celebration from a Memorial to a Feast, giving her the same ritual and legal status within the Catholic Church as the male apostles. It was a formal acknowledgment of what artists and theologians had already begun to understand: that the woman who first witnessed the Resurrection deserved to be remembered as an equal, not as a cautionary tale. Bastian Eclercy, the curator of the Frankfurt exhibition, notes that Mary Magdalene remains "probably the most multifaceted and enigmatic figure in the Bible, and also one of the most enigmatic in European cultural history." Her story is not finished. Each generation will continue to find in her what it needs to see.