For fourteen centuries, Mary Magdalene has served as a mirror held up to Christian civilization — reflecting not who she was, but what each era needed her to be. A Frankfurt exhibition at the Städel Museum now gathers more than a hundred artistic depictions of this fractured biography, tracing how a single papal sermon in 600 AD transformed the first witness to the Resurrection into a repentant prostitute, and how contemporary theology and art are slowly restoring what was taken from her. Her story is, in the end, a story about power: who holds the authority to name a woman, and what is lost w