The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  At thirteen years old, Dürer turned his formidable powers of attention on himself. He stared into a mirror (an uncommon household object at the time) and drew what he saw. Some forty years later, after he had become so renowned that even his casual scraps were treasured, he came upon this drawing among his papers and wrote a signed note upon the top of the sheet: “This I fashioned after myself out of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was still a child.” An impressive display of skill, the drawing initiated a lifelong practice of self-portraiture, a practice analyzed in a superb study by the art historian Joseph Koerner. One of the most unusual of these self-portraits was made in 1503, the year before the engraving of Adam and Eve: with a pen and brush, Dürer drew himself nude. Silhouetted against a dark background, he leans slightly forward, weight on one leg, his long hair pulled back in a net, his face sober and alert, his muscles taut. His nakedness is without a touch of shame. To call this self-portrait unusual is an understatement: there is, as Koerner notes, nothing like it in all of Western art until Egon Schiele in the early twentieth century.

  Whatever Dürer thought he was doing, whether he was motivated by self-love or by self-concern, whether he was celebrating himself or grimly diagnosing the effects of an illness, the drawing must bear some relation to the naked bodies in the nearly contemporaneous Adam and Eve engraving. Dürer had already been thinking about that engraving for some time, imagining possible poses, drawing life studies and abstract geometrical models, sketching hands holding or reaching for fruit, brooding about the ideal shape of the human body. He had studied and drawn many nudes; when the Renaissance reawakened an interest in the statuary of Greece and Rome, this became a central element in any artist’s training and an important part of studio practice. But the 1503 nude self-portrait is something different; it bears witness to the search for the original, the essential body.

  Dürer was a descendant of Adam—of that he was sure—and this descent must mean that his own naked body had, at least to a small extent, to resemble Adam’s. Of course, in Paradise Adam’s body was perfect, and all bodies since that time had fallen away from the original perfection. Nonetheless, to grasp Adam’s body—so far back in the past, so inaccessible—Dürer evidently felt that he had to grasp himself. It did not matter that no artist before him had gone this far: he was compelled to look at, to assess, and to represent with characteristic intensity his own unmasked, unprotected flesh. Far from concealing his genitals, his nude self-portrait makes them strikingly central, as if to disclose what is ordinarily hidden behind the fig leaf of clothing. But whether his family resemblance to the first human confirmed the artist’s narcissism or undermined it by calling attention to how far his body was from perfection is not clear.

  What is clear is that Dürer felt he could not use any body he had ever observed—his own or that of anyone else—as the life model for his Adam. He had to make Adam perfectly beautiful. Though there was beauty to be glimpsed everywhere in the world, including in the image he stared at in a mirror, that beauty was not the same as what was embodied in the first man and the first woman—the only two humans created directly by God. “Originally,” Dürer wrote, “the Creator made humans the way they ought to be.” To conceive that beauty in the imagination, let alone to capture it in an image, was almost impossible; after all, there was, he believed, no one alive who could grasp the whole beauty even of a blade of grass.

  All the same, as he made clear in his Four Books on Human Proportion and other theoretical treatises, he set himself the task of seeing—and accurately representing—the whole beauty of the most beautiful of all living creatures: the naked human body as God first intended it to look. Though the challenge was all but impossibly great, Dürer told himself that it befitted him to rise to it: “Let us not,” he wrote, “take unto ourselves thoughts fit for cattle.” And, though he knew he might fail, he was confident that his training, his study, and his particular genius had prepared him better than anyone living for this undertaking.

  Dürer had a sharp eye for endless differences, even among the superficially similar creatures of the same species. He had ventured out in the world and knew that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in and around Nuremberg. By 1500 he had almost certainly heard of the discoveries made by Columbus, discoveries that unsettled the geographical and ethnographical map of the world. (Years later he would see for himself some of the objects sent back by Cortés from Mexico and would write that this treasure “was much more beautiful to me than miracles.”) As a Christian, he believed in a single truth for all humankind, but that truth did not erase all distinctions. Beauty celebrated in one place was not necessarily celebrated in another. “There are many different kinds of men in various lands,” he noted; “whoso travels far will find this to be so and see it before his eyes.”

  But in the search for the true form of Adam and Eve, Dürer was committed to finding “the most beautiful human figure conceivable,” that is, the one perfect model for all humanity, in all times and in all places. “I will not advise anyone to follow me,” he wrote, “for I only do what I can, and that is not enough even to satisfy myself.” He decided that the best, possibly the only, way forward was to imitate the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis. No work by Zeuxis, who lived in the fifth century BCE, had survived, but among the many stories that were still in circulation about him was one that told how he successfully managed to depict Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Unable to find a suitable model, he gathered instead five beautiful women to serve as his models and selected from each of them their finest feature, which he then blended together into a triumphant portrait. Dürer thus set about observing and collecting particular features.

  A sheet of drawings survives in which Dürer, with his exquisite attention, observed the way that hands reach for or grasp a piece of fruit, and especially the wrinkles in the wrist caused by such an action. Whose wrist this was remains unknown, but the key point is that it belonged to a particular person at whom the artist, pen in hand, stared. You could not, as Dürer wrote, simply make up from within yourself what you longed to represent. Even the greatest artist had to look and sketch and store up in his mind what he had actually seen. “Thence the gathered, secret treasure of the heart is openly manifested in the work, and the new creature, which a man createth in his heart, appeareth.”

  In the secret treasure of Dürer’s heart were stored many particular bodies and parts of bodies—this wrist, that shoulder, these thighs, and the like—along with such crucial details as the precise way the toe touches the ground when the weight is being carried on the other foot, or the way the hip rises and the side creases when the arm is extended. It seems to be Dürer’s own side—as he had observed it in a mirror and sketched it in the nude self-portrait—that served as the model for what Adam looked like when he reached out his hand for the fatal fruit. But at this distance it is impossible to identify with any certainty the sources of most of Adam and Eve’s features.

  Perhaps there is a hint. In one of his notebooks, Dürer jotted down observations about Africans he had seen. (Several powerful drawings attest to his interest.) He remarked that their shinbones were too prominent and their knees and feet too bony. But then, having listed these problems, he went on to write, “I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms and all their limbs.” No evidence survives that Dürer used black models for his first humans. But, as he was obsessively in search of figures that could not be bettered and as he wrote that he had seen such figures among the Africans he observed, it is tempting to think that he had such excellent arms and limbs in mind when he engraved Adam and Eve.

  The problem remained that even when he gathered and conjoined the best features that he could find, he knew that a sufficiently gifted artist could always claim to find a more beautiful figure. He felt he himself had seen and sketched inst
ances of such superior beauty in the classical nudes that the Renaissance had once again put into circulation. The source of superiority, he concluded, must reside not so much in the particular features as in the proportions, but since there were so many differences among individuals, calculating the exact proportions of perfect beauty eluded him: “It seemeth to me impossible for a man to say that he can point out the best proportions for the human figure; for the lie is in our perception and darkness abideth so heavily about us that even our gropings fail.”

  In 1500, Dürer encountered an artist, the Venetian painter Jacopo de’ Barbari, who claimed to have come up with the answer: “He showed me the features of a man and a woman that he made according to a canon of proportions.” This canon of proportions was what Dürer was looking for: not or not only nude bodies, including his own, with all of their peculiar differences, but rather a set of objective geometrical measurements that would enable the artist to draw the ideal human body. Unfortunately, Jacopo evidently regarded the crucial details as trade secrets, and he refused to share them with the talented young German painter. “I would now rather see what his method was,” Dürer later wrote, “than behold a new kingdom.”

  By the time he met Jacopo, Dürer may have had trade secrets of his own. Around 1490, near Anzio, south of Rome, an ancient marble statue had been unearthed. Nearly intact, it was a second-century Roman copy of a Greek depiction of the sun god Apollo. Even before Pope Julius II installed it in the Vatican cortile, where it became known as the Apollo Belevedere, the statue had begun to arouse the interest of artists. When he traveled to Italy in 1494–95, Dürer did not see it for himself, since he did not get all the way to Rome, but he must have seen careful drawings of it or copies in wax or bronze. It was, he began to think, the solution to the riddle he had been desperate to solve. He measured and calculated. Here were the exact proportions he was seeking: head one-eighth of body length, face one-tenth; square of chest one-sixth, with its base at one-third from the crown of the head.

  Starting as early as 1495, Dürer drew the figure again and again, trying to capture not only its proportions but also its precise form, the way the weight was carried on one leg, the way the knees were bent, the way one arm reached back and the other up, the way the head was turned. Sometime around 1503 he took his ruler and compass and once again with pen and brown ink measured out the proportions of the figure. The arms and hands are unfinished—they could be intended to hold a goblet and snake, as in a drawing he made in 1501, or a scepter and sun disk, as in a drawing he made in 1502. But this time he turned over the sheet on which he had made his preliminary sketch and, using it as his guide, drew a man holding onto the branch of a tree with one hand and holding an apple with the other. He had turned Apollo into Adam.

  This then was how Dürer exquisitely created his Adam: a figure made up out of beautiful pieces of bodies stitched together according to an idealizing geometrical scheme drawn from a pagan idol. For his Eve—though, to my eyes, slightly less successfully—he did the same. Then, smoothing the copperplate and coating it with wax, he drew the figures in mirror image. Next he took the burin—the sharp, tempered-steel tool of which he was the absolute master—and carefully incised the dense network of lines on the plate. When the plate was heated and inked, he made the first print and saw what he had made. He had every reason to be immensely pleased. Reproduced again and again, sold throughout Europe and, eventually, around the world, the engraving became the definitive image of Adam and Eve, or as close to definitive as any single representation of figures so widely and frequently depicted could possibly be. Of course, along with everyone else who picked up a pen, Dürer continued to draw and paint images of Adam and Eve. But all subsequent images, his own and those of others, have an odd way of seeming to allude, deliberately or inadvertently, in homage or in opposition, to the 1504 pair.

  The Fall of Man engraving secured his name and fame, as Dürer seems to have been confident that it would. Just behind the branch onto which Adam holds, there is another branch, so close that it almost looks like an extension, on which there sits a parrot, one of those creatures whose beauty the artist longed to capture. Next to the parrot, just over Adam’s shoulder, there hangs—at once naturalistically and with the utmost implausibility—a tablet on which, along with his monogram, is inscribed “ALBERT DVRER NORICUS FACIEBAT 1504” (Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg made this, 1504). The Latin verb actually has the sense of extended time—not “made” but “was making.” The sign suggests that there in the Garden at the decisive moment in the history of the world the artist was present, and not merely present but at work. It is because of Albrecht Dürer’s “making”—the work that he did in engraving the copper plate and the work that continues every time the image on the plate is reproduced—that we, in our fallen condition, have a vision of those perfect bodies that existed before time and labor and mortality began.

  9

  Chastity and Its Discontents

  If the most influential contribution to the image of Adam and Eve was made by Albrecht Dürer in 1504, the most influential contribution to their story was made almost two centuries later by the English writer John Milton. Paradise Lost is—or so I and many others believe—the greatest poem in the English language. But it is something more: an unprecedented, even shocking fulfillment of Augustine’s injunction to interpret Genesis literally. Milton took this injunction as a challenge to make Adam and Eve real. And like Dürer, he brought to the challenge both every resource the Renaissance had crafted and every facet of his own turbulent life and times. His poem forever transformed the ancient narrative.

  The decisive event of Milton’s life—the experience to which his imagination ever afterward obsessively returned—was not his meeting with Galileo in Florence, not the outbreak of the English Civil War, not the beheading of the anointed king, not even his own descent into blindness. Rather it was the scant month or five weeks that he spent as a newlywed in the summer of 1642 with his young bride, Mary Powell. About the actual day-to-day experience of that brief period we know next to nothing; a curtain has been drawn that is impossible to pull back. Yet something happened in July of 1642, when he was thirty-three years old, that realigned everything in Milton’s life and decisively shaped the great poem he would eventually write about Adam and Eve.

  The eldest son of a wealthy moneylender and notary who had a passion for music, Milton was a brilliant, insatiable student. Everything in his education at London’s elite St. Paul’s School and then at Christ’s College, Cambridge—his study of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, his intense Bible reading, his immersion in theology—pointed in the direction of a conventional career as a learned Anglican churchman. Yet Milton, anything but conventional, never took orders and instead became a thorn in the side of the church establishment.

  Already at Cambridge there were signs of trouble ahead. In the fall of 1626, the seventeen-year-old student had a serious altercation with his principal academic supervisor, his tutor William Chappell. The precise details are unknown, but Milton was whipped and then rusticated—sent home to London—for a term. The irate tutor maintained that Milton deserved to be turned away “both out of the University and out of the society of men.” For his part, in a Latin poem he wrote to his best friend, Milton declared that he did not miss Cambridge in the slightest; he was having a far better time reading poetry, going to the theater, and ogling pretty girls.

  All of this might suggest that Milton was a rowdy undergraduate—an enemy later wrote that he had been “vomited out” of the university after “an inordinate and riotous youth”—but something like the opposite was the case. An intellectually intense, long-haired aesthete, he despised both the university’s academic curriculum, which he thought hopelessly antiquated, and its student culture, which he found fixated on heavy drinking and sexual exploits. His fellow students nicknamed him “The Lady of Christ’s.”

  It is easy to imagine the cruel teasing that the fastidious poet must have received, but Milton w
as not unarmed: he possessed an unshakable self-confidence conjoined with verbal skills finely sharpened to draw blood. He did not need to establish his manhood by drinking and whoring, he told his classmates, any more than by farm labor. He would demonstrate his virility not in the brothel but in his writing. His prose was aggressive and cutting, while his poetry was full of erotic fantasies, thinly disguised in classical robes.

  Milton shared his poems with his companions, above all with his friend Charles Diodati. It was to this intimate friend that he revealed his deepest literary ambition. “Listen, Diodati,” he wrote in a letter of 1637, “but in secret, lest I blush; and let me talk to you grandiloquently for a while. You ask what I am thinking of? So help me God, an immortality of fame.” Milton knew that there was something embarrassing about a young, largely untested writer having fantasies of soaring like Pegasus. Five years after he had graduated from Cambridge, Milton was living at home in the country—his father had recently moved from London to a small village near Windsor—and still endlessly reading. Many of his contemporaries had already married and had launched themselves into careers. Diodati, following in his father’s footsteps, had become a physician. The twenty-nine-year-old Milton remained single, a perpetual student. But he was dreaming, as he confessed to his friend, of being celebrated as a great poet.