The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The rule of shame, so prominent in the eleventh-century Hildesheim doors, continued into the later Middle Ages. Yet some artists began to explore new and surprising ways of representing nakedness, even under the sign of its disgrace. The most spectacular of these explorations is found in the town of Autun, in eastern France. There around 1130, on a lintel above a portal of the church of Saint-Lazare, a stonemason named Gislebertus carved a life-sized image of Eve. The image is only a fragment of a larger decoration, the rest of which is lost. The Eve too would have been lost, had it not been incorporated into the masonry of a house, where it was discovered when the house was being demolished in 1856.

  Gislebertus’s Eve bears the traditional marks of shame: her genitals are discreetly hidden by the sculpted trunk and leaves of a small tree, and though stretched out on the ground, she is kneeling as if in penance. She rests her head on her right hand, in a gesture that might represent sadness or remorse. And yet here the conventional imagery of the abject body strangely vanishes. This Eve has a powerful erotic allure. Her long hair falls loosely over her shoulders, and her upper torso is turned outward toward us, showing her beautiful breasts. Her slender left arm reaches back along her body, while her hand grasps a fruit from a tree behind her, a tree in which a snake’s body appears to be twisted. Her hand seems to be operating on its own, without her conscious will.

  The more one looks, the more this medieval Eve at once tantalizes and resists clear resolution. She is evidently in the act of plucking the fruit, but she has not yet carried it to her mouth, and indeed, as she leans her head on her hand and looks out musingly, she seems far away from that fatal moment. Perhaps she is still innocent, and, since in that case she would not yet feel shame, the leaves that shield her private parts from our gaze are only in the right place by happy accident. The allure of her body would not therefore be a sign of her awakened sexuality; insofar as we are aroused, it is rather a sign of our fallenness. At the same time, her kneeling and her melancholy gaze suggest inescapably that she has already fallen. She must have lost her innocence after all, and the twisting of her beautiful body toward us is a deliberate provocation. She is then a siren, a mermaid, a serpent.

  Which is it, innocent or guilty? a temptress or a penitent? an emblem of everything we are meant to leave behind when we enter the church, or a model of deportment appropriate for the sacred space? Impossible to say, and the conundrum centers on whatever it is that is hidden behind the serpentine vegetation blocking our view of her waist. For it is there, out of sight, that her body pivots in a way that is impossible for the actual human body to do. Gislebertus was able to use the nonnaturalistic conventions of medieval art and the intellectual subtlety of medieval philosophy to create an Eve who is at once aware and unaware of sin. The sacrifice that the sculptor made was of an entirely believable human body, as the Greeks and Romans had so magnificently represented it, but that classical heritage was in the distant past, and Gislebertus, if he recognized it at all, would have regarded it as a small price to pay for the effect he so brilliantly achieved.

  Medieval artists did not need the resources of ancient painting and sculpture in order to explore with extraordinary subtlety the intricate meanings of the Genesis origin story. In a vast number of sculpted lintels, carved choir stalls, panel paintings, and manuscript illuminations, they depicted Adam’s mysterious sleep when the rib was removed from his side; God’s artisanal fashioning of the first woman; the wily serpent twisting itself around the tree; the fatal act of reaching out for the fruit; the primal experience of shame; and the moment of expulsion through the gates of Paradise. That moment was particularly dramatic, for it represented the key transition from life in the purpose-built garden, with all human needs met by divine design, to life in a harsh, recalcitrant, death-driven world. Thus in the St. Albans Psalter, created in England in the first half of the twelfth century (and now in Hildesheim, Germany), God himself pushes Adam and Eve out past the slender columns that signify the gates of Paradise. Dressed in skins, they are carrying implements, the man a sickle, the woman a distaff. Adam looks back at God and at the cherub who is poised to guard the gates; Eve looks forward and points a finger out toward whatever lies ahead. The expressions on the cartoon-like faces are difficult to make out, but Eve seems to have a slight smile, as if she at least is not entirely devastated. In the beautiful Crusader Bible, made about a century later in France (and now in New York’s Morgan Library), Adam and Eve, driven by a sword-wielding angel through the gate of a narrow tower, are less prepared for the world. They have no clothes and no tools. Still naked and ashamed, they are covering their genitals with fig leaves. Both bend their heads decorously in a sign of their sadness.

  But nothing in the innumerable depictions of this scene could have anticipated the emotional intensity of the fresco of the expulsion painted around 1425 for the church of the Carmelite nuns in Florence. This fresco, by a young Tuscan artist, Tomasso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, or, as he is better known, Masaccio, has come to stand for the vast and momentous shift that took place under the pressure of the intellectual and artistic movement known as the Renaissance.

  When I first saw this fresco, in the 1960s, the figures of Adam and Eve were modestly, if scantily, dressed in fig leaves. But a thorough cleaning in the 1980s removed the fig leaves—they turned out to have been a later addition—and disclosed that Masaccio’s original Adam and Eve were stark naked. Under the impulsion of the sword-wielding angel, along with certain mysterious rays that seem to be spewing from the gate behind their backs, the figures are stepping forward, Eve’s weight on her right leg, Adam’s on his left.

  They are both utterly bereft and miserable. Her head tilted back, her eyes closed, and her mouth open in a soundless wail, Eve attempts to cover her genitals with one hand, her breasts with the other. Excruciatingly aware that she is exposed, she responds, like the naked women in those infinitely cruel photographs taken by the Nazis, to a sense of shame that bears no relation to the scene in which she finds herself. That is, it is not a social emotion, not a preservation of dignity, which drives her to try to conceal her sex; it is a primordial sense of what she must do in the face of an unendurable exposure. Adam’s response is different: his head bent down, he covers his face with both hands in a paroxysm of misery.

  The art historian Michael Baxandall has suggested that there is a moral distinction drawn in the fresco between the woman and the man: Eve’s gestures reveal that she is experiencing shame, while Adam’s disclose his sense of guilt. Perhaps. Masaccio’s unforgettable figures depend, in any case, on their overwhelming sense of embodiment, an illusion of actuality conjured up by perspective and heightened by the shadows that they cast and by the effect of movement. Adam’s right foot still touches the threshold of Paradise, but not for long. They are in the world now, and unlike the angel who possesses wings, a beautiful garment, a sword, and a kind of magic carpet, the humans are utterly unprepared. The prime source of their misery no doubt is the shame and guilt they feel as a result of their transgression, but the glimpse of the barren soil on which their feet now tread might suggest another, more material source as well. They are entering a very harsh environment, and they have nothing whatsoever to shield or protect them. From this perspective Adam’s penis, strikingly central in the fresco’s composition once the overpainted fig leaves were removed, is less a sign of his virility than of his being what Shakespeare calls “unaccommodated man.”

  Masaccio died in 1428, at the age of twenty-six, but in his brief lifetime he almost single-handedly transformed Italian art. Young painters came to study what he had done and to emulate the revolutionary new techniques that gave to his images so much dramatic power. His Adam and Eve were no longer abstract, decorative emblems of human guilt; they were particular suffering people who had bodies with volume, weight, and, above all, movement.

  At almost the same moment, in the north of Europe, another great artist, the Flemish master Jan van Eyck, found a comparably radical way to give
Adam and Eve a startlingly new bodily reality. The figures on the outer panels of his celebrated Ghent Altarpiece from 1432 are not dramatic in the way that Masaccio’s are. They do not howl in grief or shudder in guilt, nor are they being violently driven out of the Garden. They stand in painted niches at the far ends of a vast vision of redemption through the mystic Lamb of God.

  Redeemed at the end of time will be all of those whom God has elected to save, an immense multitude of the descendants of the first humans. Van Eyck depicts them in the central panel, gathered around the fountain of living waters. Adam and Eve themselves, it was thought, will be included in this multitude, so the figures are there in their niches not only as the pair who initiated sin but also as among the saved.

  There was nothing new in this theological expectation. What was new in these panels was the truly startling life-likeness of the naked man and woman. They are almost life-sized, and, since the painter’s miraculous brushwork is concealed, they seem somehow present in every pore beneath the perfectly finished surface. In today’s Ghent the viewer is no longer allowed to approach the great altarpiece; it has had, after all, a melancholy tradition of violation, including Nazi theft and, in the nineteenth century, the painting of clothing on Adam and Eve. But with digital imaging, it is now possible to get eerily close, and still the figures seem to be there in the flesh. They cover their genitals with fig leaves, but the gestures of modesty seem only to intensify their exposure and to invite an almost compulsive, amazed inspection of their nakedness. Adam’s expression is sober; his hands are reddened, probably from labor. Eve holds an odd-looking fruit in one hand, probably some kind of citrus; her belly—the womb from which we all descended—is strikingly prominent. Everything, in the minutest detail, seems to be open to view; Adam’s clipped toenails and his random hairs are particularly disturbing.

  No artist, including Michelangelo, who painted his famous fresco of the creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling some eighty years later, has ever matched, let alone exceeded, the astonishing realism of Van Eyck’s Adam and Eve. That Van Eyck was fully aware of what he had done is implicit in his entire conception of the work, but a small, invisible detail provides a special insight into this conception. An infrared reflectogram—a modern technique for looking beneath the layers of paint in order to see the artist’s original intentions and the alterations made as the work developed—revealed a startling change in the orientation of Adam’s right foot. Van Ecyk had at first depicted Adam as standing fully within his niche, with both of his feet parallel to the picture frame. But at a certain point, presumably as the figure increasingly acquired the effect of bodily reality, he changed his mind. He turned the foot outward, so that the toes seem to be projecting out of the niche and toward the viewer. It is as if Adam had come alive and were stepping into our world.

  In the fifteenth century, when the altarpiece was painted, Adam could only have this magical effect on viewers who happened to be in Ghent and went to St. Bavo’s Cathedral and saw the altarpiece in its open state. The same need to be present in a particular place was true, of course, of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve in the Carmine in Florence or the hundreds of other Renaissance paintings that participated in the project of conferring bodies on the first humans. All of these works were site-specific. In some cases, their reputation may have spread; sketches may have been produced and circulated. But their actual effects could only be experienced by those who ventured in person to the place to which they were firmly attached.

  All of this changed in 1504, when the thirty-three-year-old German artist Albrecht Dürer produced his engraving of the Fall of Man. The engraving quickly became famous, and since the copperplate technology meant that it could be handsomely reproduced again and again, it was successfully marketed and circulated. Thousands of people across Europe saw the same compelling image and were convinced that they now knew what the first humans in the Garden of Eden had looked like before the Fall. Almost nothing in the long history of Adam and Eve has had such satisfying specificity.

  Dürer’s engraving represents Adam and Eve, their glorious bodies fully facing us, on either side of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Gone is the imagery of the enclosed, carefully manicured garden or the decorative gothic towers and archways. They are standing in a deep forest; a rabbit, an elk, and an ox are visible in the shadows behind them. The only glimpse of the sky is in the far distance, above a crag on which a mountain goat, barely visible, seems poised to jump. The fatal tree is not strikingly different in form from any other tree around them, but it is bearing fruit that hangs on the branches just above Eve’s head. Eve holds one of these fruits in her left hand; in plucking it, she has taken some of the tree along with the fruit, for a twig extends from its stem across half of her body. There is no trace of shame in her posture, but the leaves on the twig just happen to cover her genitals. In her other hand, she is also holding a fruit in her fingertips. She is presumably receiving it from the serpent that is coiled around the tree, but her gesture is delicate and ambiguous enough to suggest that she could be feeding the animal instead of being fed by it. She has turned her head, her long hair flowing out behind her, and is looking intently at the serpent and the fruit.

  Adam has also turned his head, but he is directing his gaze at Eve. Reaching back with his right hand, he holds onto the branch of a tree, presumably the Tree of Life; a smaller branch from lower in the trunk of that tree happens to cover his genitals. His left arm reaches out toward Eve, and his hand is open, as if ready to receive the fruit that she is taking from the serpent’s mouth. They are still perfectly innocent and unashamed, but this is the last moment. Adam is about to let go of his hold on the Tree of Life. Human nature will change forever, and in the same instant, all of nature will change.

  The Bible said nothing about whether the animals in the Garden of Eden were fated to die natural deaths. The verses in Genesis only suggested that the first creatures were all vegetarians: “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life,” God declares, “I have given every green herb for meat” (Gen. 1:30). This diet will soon be altered forever. Adam nearly steps on the tail of a small mouse, while a cat dozes by his other foot. We know that as soon as the fatal fruit is eaten, the cat will pounce and the poor mouse too will be eaten. But like the suspended leap of the mountain goat in the distance, it is all in the realm of the not-quite-yet.

  The depiction of this final moment of innocence, captured as if by a camera with a very fast shutter speed, is brilliant enough to account for the work’s almost instant celebrity. Connoisseurs marveled at the artist’s astonishing technical skill, a skill that, as a great Dürer scholar remarks, “does equal justice to the warm glow of human skin, to the chilly slipperiness of a snake, to the metallic undulations of locks and tresses, to the smooth, shaggy, downy, or bristly quality of animals’ coats, and to the twilight of a primeval forest.” But what most seized Dürer’s contemporaries was the sheer unconstrained beauty of the two naked figures, our first parents, and particularly the beauty of Adam. It was as if almost no one had seen such bodily perfection before, certainly not in Masaccio’s despairing Adam, or Van Eyck’s bulb-shaped Eve, let alone Hildesheim’s bronze icons of shame.

  To be sure, many equally splendid nudes were created precisely at this time or shortly thereafter. Seized by the desire to resuscitate ancient art, with its plethora of idealized nudes, Renaissance painters and sculptors turned to Adam and Eve, who could be represented unclothed in all their unfallen majesty. The whole of the sixteenth century is rich in such representations, with particularly celebrated paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese in Italy, and by the elder and younger Cranach, Lucas van Leyden, Hans Baldung Grien, and Jan Gossaert in the north. And, of course, literally looming over all of these paintings is the giant Adam awakened to life on Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.

  But even in this vast field of genius, the influence of Dürer’
s Adam and Eve is preeminent. It is as if the copperplate engraving was an enormous stone thrown into a pond where it continued to produce endless ripples. Even when the artist pushed back aggressively against Dürer—as when Baldung Grien turned Adam into a decaying corpse—the master’s fingerprints are detectable. The 1504 image, so public and so perfect, was the almost inescapable model.

  This perfection did not come easily; it was the consequence of a decades-long search, and, as with other great advances in the Adam and Eve story, it drew upon everything in the artist’s whole career and life. Prodigiously gifted from childhood, trained first in the shop of his goldsmith father and then as an apprentice to a painter, Dürer mastered the art of representing virtually everything that attracted his keen gaze: a pond in the woods, the shimmering colors in a bird’s wing, a clump of grass, a beetle. The humbleness of many of the objects on which he expended his stupendous gifts did not embarrass him: “I believe that no man liveth,” he wrote, “who can grasp the whole beauty of the meanest living creature.” He was astonished and thrilled by the inexhaustible variety of things: “If to live many hundred years were granted” to a skilled artist, he wrote, he would have more than enough “daily to mold and make many new figures of men and other creatures, which none had before seen nor imagined.” It is precisely artistic skill—a combination of God-given talent and immensely hard work—that enables the observer to perceive this marvelous variety, as well as to capture at least a few of its innumerable manifestations. Where the untrained eye sees only a small repertoire of forms tediously reduplicated, Dürer saw a vast panorama of diverse objects. His particular training as a maker of woodcuts and engravings heightened his sensitivity to this diversity, for he knew, as he wrote, that it was impossible for the most skilled artist to produce the exact same picture twice or even to print identical images from the same copperplate.