Mary Magdalene: Art's Scarlet Woman

This is a film about a woman who probably never existed

but whose story changed history.

It's a story that's soaked into our culture.

It's everywhere, in every corner...

..sweaty, sensuous and naughty.

It's the story of Mary Magdalene.

If you've read this - and who hasn't? -

then you'll know something about her already

or, at least, you'll think you do

because, according to this,

Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ were lovers,

they had a baby together

and their descendants are still among us today,

hiding their secret origins.

If you haven't read this, you might have seen this -

the popular musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

In this, she's a former prostitute

who falls hopelessly in love with Jesus and who sings that famous song

to him - I Don't Know How To Love Him.

# I don't know how to love him... #

Oh, how artists through the ages

have loved the idea that Mary Magdalene

was a temptress.

# Yes, really changed... #

But even if you haven't seen or read any of these things,

the chances are you've still heard of Mary Magdalene

because she's infiltrated our culture on such a profound level.

For 2,000 years, we've been fantasising about her.

She's in our churches and on our walls...

..in our chapels and in our windows...

..in our paintings...

..and in our dreams.

Why are we so obsessed with her?

Why does she ring our bell so loudly?

And if she wasn't any of the things they say she was, who, really,

was she?

The Magdalene story begins in the Holy Land.

Where else?

She's a creature of the Bible -

its most alluring and intoxicating presence.

According to the Gospels, she was a woman from Magdala.

And this...

..is Magdala.

Today, it's just a pokey sprawl on the banks of the Sea of Galilee

but, in biblical times, this was a thriving fishing port.

Magdala Nunayya, they called it -

"Magdala of the fishes".

They still fish here when the mood takes them.

But once, Magdala was a biblical hot spot.

A few miles up the road that way is Nazareth,

where Jesus grew up.

A few miles that way is Cana, where he turned water into wine.

And over there is the Sea of Galilee, where he walked on the waves...

..or so they say.

So these are crucial biblical territories

where important things happened.

But the first thing to note about Mary Magdalene is that she hardly

features in any of them.

Considering how famous she is

and how many men through the ages have drooled over her,

what's remarkable is how little we know about her and how much we've imagined.

In the Bible, she's mentioned just a handful of times...

..a thoroughly minor character about whom we learn next to nothing.

Basically, she's mentioned four times.

And that's it. The first time is in the Gospel of Luke, where

we're told that she was one of the women who followed Jesus.

Here, I'll read you the passage.

The 12 were with him - that's the 12 Apostles.

And also "certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities,"

among them, "Mary that was called Magdalene,

"from whom seven devils had been cast out."

So she was one of the women who'd accompanied Jesus on his journeys

through these biblical lands

and he had cast seven demons out of her.

But what the hell are seven demons?

Was she possessed by seven devils?

Had she committed seven types of sin?

There's been endless speculation, but no answers.

What is clear from this first spicy mention in the Bible

is that Mary had a regrettable past.

She was stained with something sinful...

..and when women in the Bible are said to be sinful...

..the accusation usually points in a specific direction.

Jerusalem...

..where Christ was flogged, humiliated and crucified...

..and where Mary Magdalene made the most telling of her tiny appearances

in the Bible.

So we all know what happened here,

in the streets of Jerusalem -

the story of Christ's torture and crucifixion...

..how he was mocked by the baying crowd as he carried his own cross up here

to the place he was crucified,

the place we call Calvary.

Calvary, where Christ was nailed to the cross,

is actually a mistranslation from the Latin.

The real name of this morbid hilltop is Golgotha -

the Place Of The Skulls.

And that's the name I'm going to use.

It happened right there, where the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre now stands.

That is Golgotha.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Jesus was nailed to the cross,

right there, and hoisted up before us

so we could witness his suffering and his death.

It's the most powerful moment in Christian art...

..a scene of suffering

so extreme you wonder how it ever ended up in a church.

The Crucifixion is one of art's great subjects.

Every old master of note has had a go at it.

It's a scene of spectacular torture

and pain. But it's also the moment when Mary Magdalene makes her second

appearance in the Bible.

Again, it's just a passing mention...

..Mark, chapter 15, verse 27.

"Jesus gave out a loud cry and breathed his last.

"And there were women looking on from a distance.

"Among them was Mary Magdalene."

So she was there at the Crucifixion -

just a brief mention, but it was enough.

Mary Magdalene was a witness to the darkest moment in the Christian story.

She was there so she had to be imagined.

Look down to the foot of the cross in any Crucifixion

and you'll find her -

the most beautiful of the sobbing women who've come to mourn

the passing of Christ.

And if none of them is beautiful,

look for the one who's screaming the loudest

because Mary Magdalene, who barely gets a mention in the Bible,

was elevated in art to the exciting and dramatic role of chief mourner.

The third mention of Mary in the Bible is the most important of them all.

Having been there at the Crucifixion and witnessed the death of Christ,

she's also named, a few verses later,

as the first witness to his Resurrection.

On the third day, you'll remember, Jesus came back from the dead.

The job of saving us was done,

and it was Mary Magdalene who met him again...

..and who spread the word of his return.

In three of the Gospels, she's one of a group of women, all called Mary,

who find the tomb empty.

But in the Gospel of St John,

the most vivid and influential of the Gospels, it's Mary Magdalene,

and only Mary Magdalene, who first encounters the risen Christ.

Savoldo shows the moment in an unusual fashion.

Dawn is breaking...

..and there's Mary Magdalene turned towards us

with a strange expression on her face.

She's heard something

and a mysterious light has fallen on her...

..so she turns around

and there's Jesus,

looking at her.

The Savoldo, which is in the National Gallery in London, is different.

In most paintings of the scene, Mary doesn't recognise Jesus

because she thinks he's dead.

And according to St John, in his Gospel, she mistakes him for a gardener.

That's why, in Rembrandt's wacky version of the scene, Jesus sports

that unlikely horticultural hat...

..and why, when Fra Angelico painted it, he gave him a garden implement

to hold, slung casually on his shoulder.

So the sobbing Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener.

He asks her why she's crying

and she tells him that Jesus' body has disappeared.

Does he know where it's been taken?

"Mary," he says to her, and she looks up.

And she knows it's him.

Falling at his feet, the Magdalene tries to touch Jesus,

but he tells her not to.

"Noli me tangere," he says -

"Don't touch me."

He's not a man any more.

He's a god.

It's a strange scene.

Why, out of all the important figures in the Bible, was Mary Magdalene

singled out to witness Christ's Resurrection?

In the Middle Ages,

when they were especially unkind and misogynistic about these things,

the explanation that was usually given was that women were gossips

and that, by showing himself to a woman,

Christ was ensuring that word of his return would quickly spread.

But I don't think that's it.

I think it's because, from the start, Mary Magdalene was one of us -

a tangibly human presence,

the girl next door, a sinner,

like me and you.

In art, she's never a creature of the clouds.

There's always something real about her.

I mean, look at this superb terracotta by Niccolo dell'Arca.

How real is that?

So that's it - that's all the mentions of Mary Magdalene in the Bible.

She's the sinner who had seven demons thrown out of her...

..she witnessed the Crucifixion...

..and she was the first person to see Jesus when he rose from the dead.

So those are the facts.

And from now on, everything else is fantasy or fabrication or

it's a mix-up with all the other Marys in the Bible,

because there were a lot of them.

And before we go any further in this film, we need to clear that up.

So here is...

..my handy guide...

..to all the relevant Marys in the Bible.

First, there's our Mary, Mary Magdalene,

who followed Christ and witnessed his Crucifixion.

In Rogier van der Weyden's great Descent From The Cross, she's the

sobbing Mary on the right...

..the one who's wearing a Jesus and Mary chain.

But outranking her in religious status is Mary, the mother of Jesus -

the Virgin Mary.

She's everywhere in art.

In the van der Weyden, she's slumped at the front

at the sight of her dead son.

Now, according to some, and this is very confusing,

the Virgin Mary's sister was also called Mary,

and she's Mary Salome.

She's in the picture, too,

supporting her sister and weeping for her.

Then there's a third Mary, Mary Cleophas -

another female disciple of Christ who was there, they say,

at the Crucifixion.

Now, confusingly, she too was another sister of the Virgin Mary

though why anyone would name three of their daughters Mary is beyond me.

What's certain is that her tears are the most miraculous

in a masterpiece that's wet with divine sorrow.

So these three here form a family group

and they're often shown together.

But so too...

..are these three,

and they form another group, commonly known...

..as The Three Marys.

And they pop up in a lot of art.

They were especially popular in the Middle Ages.

And if you want to find the Magdalene among them, look down on the ground.

So the Magdalene was lost in a crowd of biblical Marys

and needed to stand out.

And that's where the Pharisees come in.

The Pharisees were the bad guys in the story of Jesus.

They were an Orthodox Jewish sect who were suspicious of Jesus

and who made things difficult for him.

Here are some Pharisees in a painting by Poussin.

That's Simon the Pharisee.

This is his home,

and he's throwing a big feast to which he's invited Jesus.

By inviting him for dinner here in Capernaum,

Simon was hoping to find out more about this rebellious fellow from

Nazareth, who was travelling around the Holy Land with his disciples,

spreading his new word.

The feast was a test.

Who was this Jesus of Nazareth?

And what was he up to?

Now, in those days, when you invited a guest for dinner,

one of the first things you did was to wash their feet.

They'd been travelling through the dusty desert, wearing sandals,

probably, so their feet were dirty.

In the Poussin, Simon himself is getting his feet washed by a servant.

But look who's washing Jesus' feet.

That's not a servant.

That's a woman with regrets.

All the Bible tells us about her is that she was a sinner,

an unnamed woman who came to the house of Simon the Pharisee

and who saw that Jesus' feet were dirty.

So she washed them with her tears,

dried them with her hair

and then kissed them and anointed them with oils.

It's a scene that artists through the ages loved to depict -

a desperate woman, a sinner, grovelling at the feet of Jesus...

..kissing and cleaning them,

begging for forgiveness.

No-one says it's Mary Magdalene - she could have been anybody.

But quicker than you can say Whore of Babylon,

the early Christian mind began putting two and two together,

and the unnamed sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee began to be

recognised as Mary Magdalene.

And when Gregory the Great, the Pope in Rome, made it official...

..Mary the sinner was unleashed on art.

I said there were a lot of Marys in the Bible,

but there were even more outside the Bible

in the various tales of repentance and heroism that began to be passed

from Christian to Christian.

One such tale, a very fruity one, was the story of Mary of Egypt -

the repentant harlot who lived in the desert.

Mary of Egypt was what they later called a nymphomaniac -

she loved sex,

couldn't get enough of it.

And although she was a harlot, she often did it for free,

just for the fun of it,

or so they say.

One day, Mary of Egypt decided to go to Jerusalem to tease the pilgrims.

But when she got to the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre...

..an invisible force refused to let her enter.

She couldn't get in,

and she realised that she needed to change her ways.

So she returned to the desert and became a hermit.

And for 20 years, she survived on three loaves of bread

and whatever she could find in the wilderness.

One day, another hermit, called Zosimas, came across her in a cave.

She was naked except for her hair,

which had grown so long that it covered her shameful nakedness.

Zosimas gave her his cloak to put on

and, when he returned a year later, she was dead -

a repentant sinner whose repentance was complete.

In Assisi, in the chapel devoted to Mary Magdalene, painted by Giotto...

..you can see all this being acted out on the walls...

..because, yes, you guessed it -

Mary of Egypt was another identity that was quickly added to the

growing myth of Mary Magdalene.

This idea that Mary Magdalene was a harlot, a prostitute,

that her sins were the sins of the flesh, isn't in the Bible.

There's no evidence for it of any kind.

But it soon became the big idea about Mary Magdalene,

the idea everyone wanted to believe.

Thus the life of Mary of Egypt was stolen from her

and given to Mary Magdalene.

From now on, any artist seeking to portray the Magdalene assumed,

as Jusepe de Ribera assumes here, that she was a repentant harlot...

..who needed to pay for her sins.

Having been turned into a naughty sinner,

Mary Magdalene needed a new look.

So art got busy inventing one for her.

This stuff here it is called spikenard.

It's a fragrant oil made from Himalayan plants

and it was popular in ancient times as a perfume...

..and an ointment.

Spikenard was the oil that the unnamed sinner

in the house of Simon the Pharisee

rubbed so tenderly into the feet of Jesus

when she washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair.

Prostitutes used it, too.

Its delicious aromas would intoxicate their clients

and fill them with desire.

For all those reasons, spikenard, in a vase or a jar or a bowl,

became the symbol of Mary Magdalene

and could always be found by her side.

So if you see an unknown woman in art

and there's a pot of ointment near her,

that's Mary Magdalene.

Look out also for her hair.

If it's loose and falls down her back like a river,

as it does in this Guido Mazzoni sculpture...

..that's the Magdalene as well.

Another thing to look out for is the colour of her dress.

If it's bright red, like this, then it's probably her.

Since ancient times, red has been the colour of love,

a dangerous colour.

That's why the expression "a scarlet woman" entered our language...

..because of Mary Magdalene.

Out of almost nothing, out of a handful of mentions in the Bible

and some stolen bits of other Marys...

..art constructed the giant myth of Mary Magdalene.

And it didn't stop there.

So far, everything I've told you has been set in Galilee or Jerusalem.

But the Holy Land is tiny,

too tiny to contain the enlarging myth of Mary Magdalene.

The more they fantasised about her, the less recognisable she became,

and the time soon arrived for the myth of Mary Magdalene to travel.

You must have wondered how Mary Magdalene ended up in The Da Vinci Code.

After all, that terrible book is set mostly in France.

But Mary Magdalene's story is set in the Holy Land.

OK. It's time for a bit of geography.

So...over here...

..imagine that's the Holy Land,

where Mary Magdalene's story begins in the Bible -

round about here, in Galilee...

..and this way,

all the way round...

..this is what...

..the Romans used to call Mare Nostrum, which means Our Sea.

But today...

..we call it the Mediterranean.

And also on the Mediterranean...

..up here...

..this is France.

And just about there...

..is this very beach we're standing on in Provence.

And this is the beach on which Mary Magdalene actually landed when she

fled the Holy Land and cast herself...

..at the mercy...

..of the Mediterranean.

The facts are pretty unclear

because there aren't any.

It was all made up.

But the story goes that, when the Jews began persecuting the Christians,

Mary Magdalene and her fellow Marys were put on boats with no oars,

no sails,

and they drifted across the Mare Nostrum until they reached Provence.

So she landed here on the beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer -

Saint Mary of the Sea.

And having been miraculously saved,

she set about converting the French to Christianity.

Provence was to play a gigantic role,

not just in the story of Mary Magdalene,

but in the story of art as well.

There's a famous painting of this very beach by Van Gogh

showing some boats pulled up on the sand.

At first sight, it looks like an innocent boat picture.

But at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,

there's no such thing as an innocent boat picture...

..as we shall see.

As the saint who'd converted Provence,

Mary Magdalene was particularly popular here -

a visiting superstar from the Bible who'd made the South of France her

home and whom the locals were keeping very, very busy.

Because she'd been a prostitute,

they made her the patron saint of prostitutes.

Because she'd met Jesus in the garden,

she became the patron saint of gardeners, too.

And because she'd dried Christ's feet with her hair,

she looked after hairdressers as well.

Most importantly of all,

because she'd arrived in Provence and brought Christianity with her,

they made her the patron saint of Provence.

And this was her church -

the Basilica Of Mary Magdalene.

And there she is, the woman herself

or, at least, her skull -

carefully preserved in a golden reliquary that shows off her beautiful hair,

the hair that wiped Christ's feet.

This big church in the small Provencal town of Saint-Maximin-la-Baume was

where her body was miraculously discovered in 1279.

Some monks were digging up the crypt

when they found an ancient sarcophagus.

Inside was her perfectly preserved corpse.

And drifting up from the bones was the sweet smell of roses.

Now, of course, all this had been made up. Why?

Because of the relics.

In medieval Europe, relics were like gold dust.

If you had some important ones, like the body of Mary Magdalene,

people would travel hundreds of miles to see them

and to touch them.

Relics had magic powers.

They could cure you of terminal illness or bring you babies.

If you touched a holy body, even a bit of it - a toe, a hand...

..the saintliness flowed through you and you'd go to heaven...

..or so they said.

As news spread of the great find, pilgrims began flocking here

in spectacular numbers.

And where there are pilgrims, there's money -

lots of it. And money has to be controlled.

So the church was handed over to the care of that especially fierce

religious order, the Dominicans,

and Mary Magdalene became their patron as well.

Ah, yes, the Dominicans -

punishers-in-chief of the medieval church.

As the patron saint of the Dominicans, Mary Magdalene makes a beautiful appearance

in the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence

in some deceptively exquisite Renaissance frescoes by the Dominican friar

Fra Angelico.

And all around her, the Dominicans,

the great flagellators of the monkish orders,

suffer mightily for their sins

and make sure the rest of us suffer mightily as well.

Darkness and punishment were now creeping into the story of Mary Magdalene.

Having invented her sinful past,

art was now determined to make her pay for it.

Mary Magdalene had touched Christ - she'd kissed his feet,

rubbed spikenard into them

and smelt them. And as a former prostitute,

her erotic past could never be scrubbed completely clean.

But as always, with sin, it's both deeply regrettable

and deeply attractive.

In the battered porches of medieval France, she's always easy to spot...

..a rare horizontal in a vertical world...

..crawling about on the ground,

washing Jesus' feet with her tears.

She was everywhere.

But here in Provence, they had one thing that no-one else had.

It's up there, at the end of this exhausting climb -

the Cave of Mary Magdalene.

When her work in Provence was complete and the pagans had been converted...

..the Magdalene was said to have retired here...

..high in the hills above Aix.

Just one duty remained for her to fulfil.

The scarlet woman needed to pay for the sins of her youth.

Originally, this was a grotto devoted to the Virgin Mary -

Mary, the mother of Jesus.

But as the Provencal legend of Mary Magdalene grew and grew,

the cave switched identities and became the Cave of Mary Magdalene.

This is where she spent the final 30 years of her life,

paying her penance.

She didn't eat, she didn't drink.

All she did was repent.

Mary Magdalene had already played a spectacular number of roles in art.

What she hadn't done yet is suffer properly for her sins -

really suffer.

And that's what happened here, in this cave.

To show the Magdalene atoning for her past,

for all those young men she'd led astray with her dangerous beauty...

..art invented a new genre...

..the penitent Magdalene.

Pretty much every notable artist of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries

produced a penitent Magdalene.

They were phenomenally popular.

She was usually shown at night, home alone,

remembering her naughty past...

and regretting it.

It all got very sweaty and strange.

You remember Mary of Egypt?

The harlot who lived in the desert, wore no clothes,

and whose identity was subsumed in the identity of Mary Magdalene?

Well, it was in this cave that the Mary of Egypt side of Mary Magdalene

found its weirdest expression.

This peculiar creature is the hairy Magdalene,

carved by Tilman Riemenschneider at the end of the 15th century.

Naked in the wilderness,

she's grown a thick pelt of neck-to-ankle body hair

to cover her modesty.

Riemenschneider was a German,

whose attitude to female nudity was furtive and uncomfortable.

But when the Italians started to paint penitent Magdalenes,

they had no such problem.

See, for instance, Titian's Magdalene.

Big-haired and beautiful,

in a plump, Venetian way.

She tries to cover her modesty with her gorgeous hair,

but it's all a bit half-hearted, isn't it?

So she's naked in this cave for 30 years, no food, no drink,

how did she survive?

With divine help, of course.

Seven times a day, the legends say,

angels would come down to her from heaven

and feed her on celestial music.

For 30 years, Mary Magdalene survived on ecstasy.

And in art, religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy

are always difficult to tell apart.

When Artemisia Gentileschi came to paint the scene,

she produced something that goes off the scale on the steamy front.

Mary came to the cave to repent for her sins,

but by the time Artemisia got her hands on her,

she seemed to be enjoying them again.

And when you start enjoying the sin of fornication,

we all know what happens next.

There's a painting by Caravaggio of the Magdalene in ecstasy.

It was lost for many years, but it's recently turned up.

There she is,

open mouthed, transported in a dark pleasure.

Caravaggio was especially fond of Mary Magdalene.

He painted her a number of times.

And one image in particular haunts me.

It's a penitent Magdalene, but a particularly awkward one.

What a strange pose.

There's her spikenard, and the pearls she no longer needs.

But why would anyone sit like that?

I'm going to explain it to you, but first, a little quiz.

Here we have two low chairs.

Both have a specific purpose.

Do you know what it is?

Well, this one here...

..is what they call a prayer chair.

A prie-dieu.

You use it when you want to pray.

And the usual explanation for Caravaggio's Magdalene

is that she's sitting in one of these.

The trouble is, these aren't meant for sitting.

They're meant for kneeling.

Like so.

And that's not what the Magdalene is doing.

So I think she's actually sitting on one of these.

A birthing chair.

This is a modern one,

but they've been used for thousands of years,

an especially low chair,

on which a woman sits when she's giving birth to a baby.

Look at the way Caravaggio's Magdalene holds her hands.

The tenderness on her face.

It isn't just Dan Brown who insinuated that she was pregnant

when she came to France,

lots of artists have implied it.

Rogier van der Weyden, the master of the tear,

implied it with exceptional subtlety

in his beautiful Braque Triptych in the Louvre.

See how the laces of the Magdalene's corset are loosened

at the tummy.

In Flemish art, loosened laces are the sign of pregnancy.

There are various ways to read all this.

There's the Dan Brown way,

the sensational way, that she really was pregnant with Jesus' baby,

and that their descendants are still among us today,

plotting their return.

Or there's something more subtle.

The van der Weyden way,

in which Mary Magdalene's love of Jesus

is understood as a spiritual state.

What she's carrying is the Word of God.

That's what she came to France with.

She's the bride of Christ, but in the spiritual sense.

Inside Mary Magdalene is the Christian future.

THUNDER RUMBLES

You recognise that view, don't you?

It's one of the most famous views, not just in Provence,

but in the whole of art.

It is, of course, the Mont Sainte-Victoire,

Cezanne's favourite mountain.

Heaven knows how many times he painted it.

He was a local boy, a Provencal through and through.

And the great mountain was always on his horizon.

What you may not know, is that our cave, the Cave of Mary Magdalene,

is also over there on the other side of the mountain.

And Saint-Maximin-la-Baume is there as well

With Mary Magdalene's skull.

The presence of the Magdalene is something you feel everywhere

in Provence.

She's soaked into the region's history.

She's soaked into Cezanne.

Although he's thought of as the great pioneer of modern art,

which he was,

Cezanne had another side to him.

He was very religious in a blunt and Provencal way.

His views on art were progressive,

but his views on women were not.

This spectacularly awkward painting is Cezanne's penitent Magdalene.

He painted her in her cave, kneeling, praying for forgiveness.

There's a misshapen skull on her table,

and Mary herself is bulky and unglamorous.

So unglamorous she looks more like a man than a woman.

When you first see it, it's a very unappealing picture,

clumsy and dark.

But one of the great things about film cameras is that they allow you

to get really close to paintings.

When you get really close to Cezanne's Magdalene,

the clumsiness fades down,

and the pathos fades up.

Those white blobs above her head, incidentally,

are the pearls that fell from the roof of her cave.

Pearls, they say, made out of the Magdalene's tears.

Tears are the scarlet woman's great gift to art.

And in Provence, the Magdalene and her tears are never far away.

So, in this, Mary Magdalene comes to France pregnant.

She has Jesus' baby, and establishes a dynasty

that marries into the French royal family.

And they're still out there today, somewhere.

It's complete nonsense.

Utter fantasy.

But Mary Magdalene's story is 99% fantasy.

Most of it has been made up.

What's really remarkable though, is how influential it's been.

That's why I've brought you to this beach again.

And this is where Van Gogh comes in.

We're just up the road from Arles,

deep in Van Gogh country.

We all know what Van Gogh did in Provence.

He painted some of the most celebrated masterpieces

of postimpressionist art.

And on this beach, at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,

he painted his famous boats pulled up on the sand.

It's the same beach on which Mary Magdalene was said

to have landed with her fellow Marys.

Three boatloads of ancient Christians,

washed up without rudders or sails at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

And if you look carefully,

you'll see that the battered box also washed up on the beach

is signed "Vincent."

One of the big mysteries of Van Gogh

that's always puzzled people,

is why he came to this bit of Provence in the first place.

I mean, he had the whole of the South of France to choose from.

So why pick somewhere as pokey and backward as this?

TRAIN WHISTLES

Well, I have a theory about that.

It involves Mary Magdalene and this book here.

Mireio by Frederic Mistral,

the greatest Provencal poet.

It's set at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,

right here,

and a few miles up the road in Arles,

where Van Gogh cut off his ear,

so notoriously.

And it tells the story of a beautiful local girl called Mireio,

and a soulful young man, who falls in love with her,

named Vincent.

Vincent is a humble basket weaver.

An itinerant craftsman who fixes chairs.

Like the one Van Gogh painted as a stand in for himself

in the yellow house in Arles.

Mireio, meanwhile, was from the other side of the tracks,

the daughter of a local landowner -

rich, spirited, and lovely.

They meet in an orchard, Vincent loves Mireio immediately,

and she loves him.

But her father disapproves, so they make a pact.

If anything is to happen to either of them,

they should meet over there at the Church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,

where Mary Magdalene and her fellow Marys will look after them,

and save them.

Mireio was turned into an opera by Charles Gounod.

And it was playing in Brussels when Van Gogh lived there,

studying to be a preacher.

OPERA MUSIC PLAYS

In the opera, there's an important moment set in the arena in Arles,

where Vincent meets Mireio at the bullfights,

and they grab a secret moment to express their love.

Interestingly, just before he came to Arles,

Van Gogh started to sign his work "Vincent".

It's an unusual thing to do, to use your Christian name so often,

so prominently.

He said it was because people found Van Gogh difficult to pronounce.

But there's something insistent about that signature,

something declamatory,

and loud.

While we're on the subject of names, Mireio is Provencal for Mireille,

and both are derived from Miriam,

a biblical name that's also used sometimes for Mary Magdalene.

Mireio, Mireille, Miriam, Mary -

she switched identities more often than Jason Bourne.

But whatever she called herself,

artists couldn't stop dreaming about her.

So what am I saying?

What I'm saying is that this poem and the opera made from it

played a decisive role in Van Gogh's life.

I'm saying that Van Gogh came to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

because of it.

And that's why he painted the beach, and the boats.

I'm saying he painted the bullring in Arles

because that's where Vincent met Mireio.

And that this could be him and her, right there.

I'm saying that Van Gogh began calling himself Vincent,

not for reasons of pronunciation,

but because he identified so fiercely

with the humble basket weaver.

I think he came here looking for love.

Mistral's poem haunted him.

It singled him out, and filled him with yearning.

I think he came to Arles because that's where Mireio is set.

And I think he came here to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

because this is where Vincent and Mireio ended up,

in this church, in front of Mary Magdalene.

And that's the thing about the story of Mary Magdalene.

It twists here and there,

but it keeps coming back to love.

So there we have it.

How a few grains of truth were turned into the mountain of fantasy

that is Mary Magdalene.

She's a work of fiction.

One of the great female leads created by the artistic mind.

But where most fictional characters are the work of a single author,

Mary Magdalene is a communal achievement.

MUSIC: Charmer Gip Die Varwe Mir by Carl Orff