Noli me tangere

Noli me tangere (Do Not Touch Me), painted in 1917 and held in the Hungarian National Gallery, depicts the post-Resurrection encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene recorded in John 20:17 — the moment when the risen Christ appears to Mary in the garden and she reaches toward him, only to be told not to touch him. The subject had been a standard of European religious painting since the Middle Ages, with celebrated treatments by Fra Angelico, Titian, and Rembrandt establishing the iconographic convention of the raised hand and the gesture of reaching. Benczúr painted this in 1917, at the height of the First World War, and the theme of the figure who has passed through death into a realm beyond ordinary touch carries obvious resonance during a period of mass casualties and grief. The Hungarian National Gallery preserves the work as part of Benczúr's later religious output, which became more prominent in the final decades of his long career.

The Noli me tangere composition required Benczúr to balance two figures — one reaching, one withdrawing — within a garden setting that carries both natural and spiritual significance. The gestures of hand and body must be legible across a distance while maintaining the psychological intimacy of the encounter. The garden setting allows a range of light effects appropriate to the dawn hour at which the scene is set.