G. Levy after Rembrandt. "Noli me Tangere"

Melville’s print entitled "Noli me Tangere” is from the painting Christ and St. Mary Magdalene at the Tomb in the English Royal Collection (fig. 1). The painting was inscribed by Rembrandt in 1638 and acquired by King George IV in 1819, residing in Buckingham Palace during the time of young Melville’s visit to England in 1849. As Christopher White notes in The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Rembrandt follows very closely “the subject of the picture” in John 20:10-15: “In the mouth of the cave on the right, two angels are seated on the empty tomb, before which the Magdalen kneels; she looks over her shoulder at Christ who stands behind her, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a spade; to the left, two women descend the flight of steps; in the background, a town with a vast church with twin towers . . . The omission of the halo from Christ’s head makes it clear that Rembrandt intended to illustrate the moment before Christ was recognized by the Magdalen. The city of Jerusalem is depicted in the background,” but “the cathedral in the distance is reminiscent of . . . English medieval architecture” (White, no. 161, pp, 105-06). In the engraving, as in the painting, Rembrandt's deployment of the early morning light highlights the spiritual meaning of the scene. 

The commentary that accompanied “Noli me Tangere” in London’s Art-Journal in 1857 was defensive, questioning whether Rembrandt’s “strange” depiction of “the risen Christ” was worthy of being engraved. Acknowledging that Mary Magdalen had “supposed him to be the gardener,” the writer objects that “one can scarcely suppose that even a Jewish gardener was so habited.” Similarly, Rembrandt “has fashioned his Eastern garden after the similitude of one about Leyden or Amsterdam.” Faced with such seeming incongruities, the writer explains that there are several Rembrandts in the Royal Collection, that one of them had to be engraved, and that this painting is the best of the bunch. Its most distinguishing feature is Rembrandt’s depiction of “the dawn of morning,” which has “given full scope for his deep chiaro-oscuro” (p. 140).  

Nineteen years later Melville presented his own vision of this site and scene in Clarel. Newly arrived in Jerusalem, Clarel visits that very spot where “Our Lord was urned”—and where “He reappeared, by Mary claimed.” In Melville words, as in Rembrandt’s depiction, that “place alleged, is shown” with “Arbors congealed to vaults of stone.” Like Rembrandt, Melville is also attentive to atmospheric chiaroscuro in depicting  

The spot where in the dawning gray,  

 His pallor with night’s tears bedewed,  

 Restored the Second Adam stood—  

 Not as in Eden stood the First 

 All ruddy. 

Even more like Rembrandt is the psychological chiaroscuro, the human uncertainty, with which Melville evokes the Magdalen’s “misjudging” moment: 

Yet, in leaves immersed 

And twilight of imperfect day, 

Christ seemed the gardener unto her 

Misjudging, who in womanhood 

Had sought him late in sepulchre 

Embowered, nor found.  (NN C 1.5.74-89) 

Whether or not Melville had acquired his copy of “Noli me Tangere” by the time he published Clarel in 1876, he would have had easy access to the engraving in the 1857 volume of The Art-Journal in the library of his friend Evert Duyckinck, from whom he was borrowing multi-volume art books such as Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters and Lanzi’s History of Painting in Italy in November 1859 (Sealts pp, 108-09; nos. 534a and 320). Melville’s interest in Rembrandt, as well as in chiaroscuro, no doubt informed his canto “Concerning Hebrews” in Clarel.  The entire canto reveals extensive knowledge of Jewish intellectual history in the Amsterdam of Rembrandt’s day, with special emphasis on Uriel Acosta and Baruch Spinoza, each of whom was expelled from the Jewish faith for heretical thought, moving the narrator to declare that “Rabbis have their troublers too” (2.22.52).

At the end of “Concerning Hebrews,” Melville employs a “shadow” worthy of Rembrandt himself. It gathers within Vine, grafted from a garden.   

Meanwhile, Vine had relapsed.  They saw 

In silence the heart’s shadow draw— 

Rich shadow, such as gardens keep 

In bower aside, where glow-worms peep 

In evening over the virgin bed 

Where dark-green periwinkles sleep— 

Their bud the Violet of the Dead. (2.22.143-149) 

The extended analogy with the garden bower connects the “Rich shadow” of Vine’s heart to the garden scene much earlier in the poem, when Mary Magdelene had seen Christ “in the twilight of imperfect day.” That early twilight, however, was “dawning,” whereas this one is settling into silent night.   

Given that Melville’s depiction of Vine in Clarel draws in part upon his memory of the life and art of his late friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, the deep shadow that he draws across the “garden” of Vine’s heart recalls the literary chiaroscuro with which Melville had characterized Hawthorne’s art in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Writing in 1850, Melville had seen one side of Hawthorne’s “soul” as “Indian-summer sunlight,” whereas the other was “shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.” Where the two sides of the soul meet, we see those “bright gildings” that “but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds” (a word picture that applies nicely to those conspicuous “gildings” that “fringe” the “edge” of Christ’s outstretched left arm, as well as of the spade, in Melville’s print of Rembrandt’s “Noli me Tangere”) (NN PTO 243). In Clarel, twenty-six years later, the “heart’s shadow” within Vine’s refined sensibility has increasingly come to obscure the light altogether. Vine, in his physical disposition toward other characters, and Clarel in particular, has increasingly become a literal embodiment of the Biblical injunction “Noli me Tangere”: “Do not touch me.”   

How different are the imagery and psychology of Rembrandt’s “Noli me Tangere” from Titian’s painting of the same subject that Melville saw in the collection of Samuel Rogers in 1849 (fig. 2; CAT 109, fig. 2): 

Or from the way Mary Magdalen does touch Christ’s right leg in the lower right-had corner of Veronese’s Feast in the House of the Simon the Pharisee (fig. 3 below), which Melville also saw in the collection of Samuel Rogers in December 1849 (see the discussion surrounding CAT 110, figures 3 and 7):