1. The topos of a text or image functioning as a speculum —mirror—is found repeatedly in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. Mirrors were typically round at that time, so cupolas carry a particular attraction for this sort of comparison. Overviews of mirror symbolism are found in G. F. Hartlaub, Zauber des Spiegels. Geschichte und Bedeutung des Spiegels in der Kunst , Munich, 1951; H. Schwarz, "The Mirror in Art," Art Quarterly 15 (1959): 96-118; and a special double issue of Source (5, Winter-Spring 1985), which contains articles devoted entirely to mirrors, with updated bibliographies. Particularly relevant to this study are R. Baldwin's "Plutarch's Wife as Mirror in a German Renaissance Marriage Portrait" (68-71) and N. Salomon's "A Woman's Place: The Queen in Las Meninas " (72-79). Salomon discusses the reversal of the queen's and king's normal positions, the queen appearing at the picture's privileged right and the king at its left.

2. Elsewhere in the Bible spinning is associated with the good wife and women in general, e.g., Exod. 35:25-26 and Prov. 31:19. Echoing other medieval authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, writing the "Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale" for his Canterbury Tales about a century later than the mosaics, sees spinning as natural to women: "Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng God hath yive / To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve" (ll.401-2). Some useful ideas and bibliography on spinning are found in L. F. Hodges, "Noe's Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner," in Equally in God's Image , ed. J. B. Holloway, C. S. Wright, and J. Bechtold, New York, 1990, 30-39. Scholars have been unable to ascertain a specific textual source for Eve's use of a spindle and distaff, although H. L. Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours , Princeton, 1977, 22, quotes a Syrian commentary on Genesis, where God "instructed the woman (Eve) in the art of weaving." See in the text below a quotation from Tertullian, which may also be relevant. Eve is associated with cloth making and Adam with agriculture at least as early as the fourth-century sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, where she is shown with a sheep and Adam with a sheaf of wheat. Interestingly, that Eve spun during her labors is specified in the Speculum humanae salvationis (first quarter fourteenth cent.), but its unknown author must have been unaware of any legitimate textual source, for he cites a false reference to Gen. 7 (in J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, Speculum humanae salvationis. Traduction inédite de Jean Miélot [1448] , 2 vols., Leipzig, 1907, 2:185. These authors link the tradition to a verse popular in the Middle Ages: "Quand Adam bechait, quand Eve filait / Où donc était le gentilhomme?").

3. P. Molmenti, Venice: Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic , pt. 1, The Middle Ages , 2 vols., Bergamo, 1906, 2:42, notes this in the statuti of Chioggia of both 1272 and 1291. Because Creation took six days, and on the seventh day God rested, the eighth day was associated with the start of the earthly realm of work. Perhaps this demarcated the end of the "honeymoon"?

4. Weitzmann and Kessler, The Cotton Genesis , 37-38, and Weitzmann, in Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 2:116, where he adds that it is possible that the Cotton Genesis included the spindle and distaff, but that the throne was very unlikely. Regarding Eve and Mary, see the classic treatment in E. Guldan, Eva und Maria , Graz and Cologne, 1966, and the recent and very useful exhibition catalogue by H. D. Russell, Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints , Washington and New York, 1990, especially 113-39. Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 1:41, notes that this is a Western, not Byzantine, typology.

5. This last forms the southern vestibule through which one can enter the atrium, directly below the cupola of the Creation; see Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 1:40-41. For the other churches, see Borsook, Messages in Mosaic , 62, and Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art , 1:37.

6. S. Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography of the Venetian Republic , Rome, 1974, 203, on Venice's founding. There are many examples of a seated Eve at the scene of the labors, sometimes with and sometimes without a distaff and/or spindle, but most commonly the reference is to her role as mother of all living (Gen. 3:20), for she generally sits and nurses one or more children. The San Marco mosaic is unusual in its combination of an enthroned Eve (not just seated on a hillock), with distaff and spindles, dressed in greater finery than Adam, and without children. That she is not pregnant yet is indicated by the scene of Cain's conception, which follows in the lunette below, an event that was understood to represent Adam and Eve's first postlapsarian carnal encounter.

7. E. Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha , ed. W. Schneemelcher, trans. R. Wilson, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1963, 1:379-80. G. M. Gibson discusses this text and iconographic motif in "The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin," in Equally in God's Image , ed. J. B. Holloway, C. S. Wright, and J. Bechtold, New York, 1990, 46-54. Eve as an antitype for Mary is also found at San Marco in the Temptation of Eve (see discussion above).

8. A recent examination of the Santa Maria Maggiore Annunciation appears in J. Sieger, "Visual Metaphor as Theology: Leo the Great's Sermons on the Incarnation and the Arch Mosaics at S. Maria Maggiore," Gesta 26 (1987): 85-86. In a Byzantine-inspired, ninth-century ivory from Charlemagne's court, Mary wears military garb and sits with spindles and cross-scepter; consult S. Lewis, "A Byzantine 'Virgo militans' at Charlemagne's Court," Viator 11 (1980): 71-93, especially 73-75, on the relationship of spindles to the Incarnation. An example that is closer chronologically is at Monreale: the late-twelfth-century Annunciation , in front of the apse and directly opposite Eve on the west wall, shows Mary standing with distaff in hand. See Borsook, Messages in Mosaic , 62 and pls. 62 and 86; pl. 88 shows Eve seated at her labors with a distaff.

9. Exegesis differs on this point. Some understood Gen. 3:22 to mean that Adam was not immortal prior to the Fall but could become immortal were he to eat of the Tree of Life. See Bloom, The Book of J , 186.

10. The Antiquities of the Jews 1.1.

11. See S. L. Smith, "The Power of Women Topos on a Fourteenth-Century Embroidery," Viator 21 (1990): 212-13, regarding Adam's bestial nature following the Fall, where she paraphrases Thomas of Cî-teaux and quotes John of Salisbury (the English translation is mine). While it is unlikely that the Venetian mosaicists knew these specific texts, they are representative of the Middle Ages. Pellegrino ("Il 'topos' della 'status rectus'") discusses this pre-Christian and Christian idea of humans' differing from animals due to reason; this was expressed visually through their status erectus .

12. The question of who sinned more terribly was considered carefully by medieval exegetes. Typically, their conclusions are complex, on the one hand stressing that because Adam was more perfect, he fell farther, yet also noting that Eve sinned twice as much. Not only did she disobey God, but she also led Adam astray. Evans, " Paradise Lost" and the Genesis Traditions , especially 178-82, reviews this issue of relative guilt according to a variety of medieval authors.

13. Augustine examines this issue in several of his writings, for example, The City of God 14.23 and De Genesis ad litteram 9.4 (Evans, 94, examines Augustine's position).

14. Barr, "The Influence of St. Jerome on Medieval Attitudes to Women," 94-95, and idem, "The Vulgate Genesis," 127, compares the Hebrew version of Gen. 3:16 ("Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you") to Jerome's Vulgate ("You will be under the power of your husband, and he will rule over you"). She confirms that the Old Latin version retained the older sexual meaning. The Cotton Genesis was a Greek translation of the Old Latin text, not the Vulgate. Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent , chap. 6, passim, discusses Augustinian and other early perspectives on the punishments of Adam and Eve, including that of "desire."

15. On this theme in general, see S. L. Smith, "'To Women's Wiles I Fell': The Power of Women Topos and the Development of Medieval Secular Art," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978, passim; idem, The Power of Women , Philadelphia, 1995, passim; Silver and Smith, "Carnal Knowledge: The Late Engravings of Lucas van Leyden," especially 250-57, where they suggest that the earliest Fall used as an example of the Power of Women is found in the early-fourteenth-century Distaff House in Constance. Smith, "'To Women's Wiles I Fell,'" 273-77, discusses these murals further, and on 44 notes that it was St. Jerome who first identified Adam as a victim in the Power of Women theme. The distaff here then functions as a mock scepter for Eve but also derides Adam: distaffs were sometimes attributes of the cuckold. See Camille, The Gothic Idol , 301-2, and A. G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers: A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art , New York, 1979.

16. See N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France , Stanford, Calif., 1975, especially the chapters "The Reasons of Misrule" (97-123) and "Women on Top" (124-51) on the dynamics of this kind of imagery, which she calls "women on top." Others have argued that this kind of reversal only reasserts the orthodox hierarchy, but Davis disagrees, arguing (129) that the inversion could lead to new possibilities for women.

17. Ll. 255, 258, 445, and 447 (trans. Stone, 168 and 174).

18. Translation by this author of Jean Miélot's fifteenth-century French translation of the original Latin text: "et cellui qu'il vuelt estre laboureur aux champs, ne se doit vestir de soie" (Lutz and Perdrizet, Speculum humanae salvationis , 123). Chapter 1 of the Speculum text explains that Eve's first great sin was her proud wish to be like God; her second was to tempt Adam (Lutz and Perdrizet include both the original Latin fourteenth-century text, beginning on 4, and Miélot's, beginning on 122). Chapter 2 concerns Adam and Eve after the Expulsion and admonishes the reader to be wary of the deceitful and fraudulent world. Expressing many of the same ideas as the San Marco mosaics, the writer cautions that love of riches and fancy dress leads to damnation. The image illustrated here as Fig. 29 is from a Flemish manuscript of Miélot's text, illustrated c. 1485-95 and discussed in A. Wilson and J. L. Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum humanae salvationis , 1324-1500, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1984, 60-61.

19. See chap. 3 n. 21 above.

20. J. Alexander, " Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 447, discusses fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples of both peasants and Adam and Eve in fancy clothing as scenes of mockery and discusses this English illumination on 447. Already in the early Christian era avarice was sometimes associated with the Fall because some writers saw the Fall as greed for food, and this led to Adam's association with Dives. See P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity , New York, 1988, 220 and 406. Several Middle Byzantine ivory caskets include a figure of Avarice or Wealth alongside the laboring Adam and Eve, and so may well refer to this ancient tradition. See, for example, the ivories illustrated in A. Goldschmidt and K. Weitzmann, Die Byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.-XIII. Jahrhunderts , 2d ed., vol. 5 of A. Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen , Berlin, 1979, 1:nos. 68 and 69.

21. Chap. 21, "On Lust"; Dietz trans., 48.

22. See Williams's discussion of Hagar and Muslim women and their association with sexuality, in his " Generationes Abrahae ," as well as John Boswell's comments on thirteenth-century Europe's perception of Muslim sexual immorality in his Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality , Chicago and London, 1980, 279-81. Potiphar's wife lived, of course, centuries before the establishment of Islam, but her actions caused her to be associated anachronistically with Muslims. The anti-Arab biases in the narthex mosaics at San Marco are also evident in the visual and textual narratives of Ishmael and Isaac. For example, Hagar is located to the picture's left when she gives birth to Ishmael, the privileged right being reserved for the standing figures of Abraham and Sarah (Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 2: pl. 222), yet Sarah lies to the picture's right when she bears Isaac (2: colorpl. 50). At his circumcision Ishmael has his genitals exposed, a reference to his carnality, while in the immediately following Circumcision of All Men and later Circumcision of Isaac , no genitals are visible (2: pls. 226, 227, and 234). The choice and editing of the text in the Latin tituli for the Ishmael scenes reveal these same anti-Muslim prejudices. Venice's attitudes toward Egypt, specifically, were clearly complex in this age. Alexandria might have been "home" to St. Mark in the apostolic age, yet it was also the site of his martyrdom and the home of Arabs.

23. In this famous passage, Paul interweaves—in addition to pride, carnality, and submissiveness—two further themes recurrent at San Marco: the question of whether Eve was also made in God's image and the role of the fallen angels.

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head.... For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.) That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels.... if a woman has long hair, it is her pride.

The "angels" is a reference to the legend of the Watcher Angels, who disrupted the divinely ordained hierarchy by falling victim to the seductive beauty of the daughters of men and defiling themselves with them sexually. For the legend of the Watcher Angels, which originates in Gen. 6:1-8, consult Prusak, "Woman: Seductive Siren and Source of Sin? " 90-93 and 98-104, and J. B. Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity , Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1977, and idem, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (indices, s.v. "Watcher Angels"). Several of the noncanonical Jewish texts relate (in varied forms) the story of the Watcher Angels, e.g., the Book of Jubilees 5 (R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English , 2 vols., Oxford, 1913, 2:20), and the Book of Enoch 6-10 (ibid., 191-95). Tertullian's "On the Veiling of Virgins," where he concurs with Paul, is translated in The Ante-Nicene Christian Library , 18:154-80 (see especially 165-68 for his Pauline exegesis). These ideas about veiling persisted into the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. See Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman , section 2.8.1 and passim. Paul's admonition that males pray without their heads covered is, of course, anti-Jewish propaganda.

24. Kessler, Illustrated Bibles from Tours , 22 n.34, notes a Syriac commentary on Genesis that indicates that God taught Eve the art of weaving.

25. Tertullian, The Ante-Nicene Christian Library , 11:304-5 and 309; these passages are discussed by R. H. Bloch, "Medieval Misogyny," Representations 20 (1987): 11-15; idem, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love , Chicago and London, 1991, 39-47; and Prusak, "Woman: Seductive Siren and Source of Sin?" 104-5.

26. Miles, Carnal Knowing , 35 and n. 54, citing J. Z. Smith, "The Garments of Shame," 235.

27. Camille, Gothic Idol , 223, discusses this aspect of medieval optical theory, which is also the source for the convention of profile heads' being used for evil figures in images. Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, makes use of the poetic convention of "love's fatal glance" (discussed with further references in P. Simons, "Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History , ed. N. Broude and M. D. Garrard, New York, 1992, 50 and n. 88). The writer of the Book of Reuben acknowledges the danger of the gaze and connects it to the successful beguiling of men by women. Women, because they have "no power or strength over man, use wiles by outward attractions" and by the "glance of the eye instill the poison" in men (Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament , 1:297).

28. A general treatment of antimarriage literature and its revival in the twelfth century is found in K. M. Wilson and E. M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer , Albany, N.Y., 1990.

29. This and the following quotation are from B. Cecchetti, "La donna nel medioevo a Venezia," Archivio veneto 31 (1886): 63-64. Many of Fra' Paolino's complaints—particularly those that take the formulation of "if she's such and such," that is bad, "if she's the opposite," that is even worse—come from the fragmentary Liber aureolus de nuptiis , attributed to Theophrastus (d. 287 B.C.E. ) and preserved only in Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum . An English translation of it is included in R. P. Miller, ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds , New York, 1977, 411-14, and Wilson and Makowski discuss it in Wykked Wyves , 51-53 and passim.

30. On the Misery of the Human Condition , 17 (Dietz trans., 20-21).

31. Ibid., 20.

32. Cecchetti, "La donna nel medioevo a Venezia," 64.

33. For example, women were punished more severely for some sex crimes, such as abducting young women against their wills, yet were not regularly tried for acts of fornication and adultery. G. Ruggiero, "Sexual Criminality in the Early Renaissance: Venice 1338-1358," Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 21-24, discusses these and suggests that in the former case it is because those crimes were more outside the norms for female behavior, and in the latter, possibly because discipline was left to the woman's father and/or husband. It may also be that fornication and adultery were seen as "natural" for women.

34. M. M. Newett, "The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Historical Essays , ed. T. F. Tout and J. Tait, London and New York, 1902, 263.

35. Many writers have noted that the thirteenth century was a time of increased repression of "others" by both the church and secular authorities. The Third and Fourth Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215, respectively, offer examples of increased ecclesiastical controls, and many civic codes—legislating, for example, dress codes, prostitution, Jews, and Muslims—originated at this time. General treatments of this topic include Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality , 269-354; G. Duby, ed., Revelations of the Medieval World , vol. 2 of A History of Private Life , trans. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1988, 569-70; and J. K. Hyde, "Contemporary Views on Faction and Civil Strife in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Italy," in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities , 1200-1500, ed. L. Martines, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972, 273-307. Regarding Venetian expansion of sumptuary legislation, rules made by men and generally aimed at controlling women, consult Newett, "The Sumptuary Laws of Venice," as well as C. Diehl, Une république patricienne . Venise , Paris, 1938, 151-53, where he notes Venice's reputation as a city of easy virtue. J. Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400-1500 , London, 1981, 161, points out that while both men and women used embellishments and perfumes, sumptuary legislation represented laws issued by men against women. Furthermore, the general ineffectiveness of the legislation is suggested by the repeated attempts to limit dress.

36. D. Herlihy, "Women and the Sources of Medieval History: The Towns of North Italy," in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History , ed. J. T. Rosenthal, Athens, Ga., and London, 1990, 136. E. C. Dargan, A History of Preaching , 2 vols., New York, 1905, I: chap. 7, gives an overview of thirteenth-century preaching and the increasing popularity of vernacular sermons. Popular preachers would often sermonize outdoors, in front of churches and in piazzas, and would make use of extra-biblical legends, folktales, and local customs as well as the standard older authorities, especially Augustine (1:187-91).

37. In the remaining Old Testament mosaics, God generally appears in the form of his gesturing right hand and almost never again in fully anthropomorphic form. The Byzantine Octateuch tradition also avoids a fully anthropomorphic Creator, similarly substituting his hand. The mosaic of Cain's conception omits even the hand and thus remains faithful to its Cotton Genesis model. It, of course, had no need for an image of the Deity, since the Genesis text makes no reference to him.

38. Historia scholastica , chap. 10 (PL 198: 1064); see Evans, " Paradise Lost " and the Genesis Traditions , 169.

39. Howard, in his introduction to the translation, discusses Innocent's attack on the Cathars and his ambivalence with regard to procreation (xviii-xx). Both E. Clark, "Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve: Interpretations of Genesis 1-3 in the Later Latin Fathers," in Genesis 1-3 in the History of Exegesis , ed. G. A. Robbins, Lewiston, N.Y., and Queenston, Ont., 1988, 99-103, and Schreiner, "Eve, the Mother of History," passim and 151-56, discuss the conflicts inherent in medieval commentary on this divine exhortation, and Evans, 169, notes that Comestor specifically responds to the heretics on this point. E. M. Makowski, "The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law," in Equally in God's Image , ed. J. B. Holloway, C. S. Wright, and J. Bechtold, New York, 1990, 129-43, discusses canonical doctrine about marital sexual relations from the twelfth through mid-fourteenth centuries.

40. On the Misery of the Human Condition , 3 (Dietz trans., 8).

41. Silver and Smith, "Carnal Knowledge: The Late Engravings of Lucas van Leyden," 257-58.

42. See Weitzmann and Kessler, The Cotton Genesis , figs. 67 and 68 and text p. 58. In the badly damaged Cotton Genesis miniature, Adam's left arm crosses his chest and may reach over to Eve's breast; however, her hand does not touch Adam's genital region.

43. E. C. McLaughlin, "Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes," 222-33, discusses this paradox.

44. Bamberger, Fallen Angels , 132-34, 171, and 182, discusses some of these many stories regarding Cain. Dualists also understood Cain to be the product of evil emanations. An Ethiopic Book of Adam and Eve (Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha , 2:250, identifies it as an eleventh-century Christian work based on an original composed between 100 B.C.E. and C.E. 200), popular throughout the Middle Ages, makes much of Adam and Eve's first experience of intercourse and the resultant conception of Cain, casting the event in a very positive light. According to that text, it is only after Adam and Eve marry and confirm their union that they are free of Satan's wiles. See the translation by S. C. Malan, The Book of Adam and Eve, also Called the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan , London and Edinburgh, 1882, 90-91.

45. As Weitzmann and Kessler ( The Cotton Genesis ) reconstruct the book, it included the Birth of Cain and the Birth of Abel (fol. 14r), and the Birth of Seth (fol. 19r) and the Death of Adam (fol. 20r). Both of Eve's omitted speeches use the verb dicere , albeit in participial form, dicens (saying). The first is Gen. 4:1: "dicens possedi hominem per Dominum" ("saying, I am possessed of a human through the Lord; or perhaps clearer in Hebrew, which would translate, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord"); the second is Gen. 4:25: "dicens posuit mihi Deus semen aliud pro Abel" (saying, the Lord has appointed to me another child instead of Abel). With regard to these important speeches by Eve, discussed far less often than Gen. 1-3, see Pardes, Countertraditions , chap. 3, especially 52-53, where she interprets the birth of Cain (based on Eve's naming speech) as a second Fall due to pride, and that of Seth as a reconciliation between a newly rehabilitated Eve and God.

46. Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 2:79.

47. The visual conventions remain important to the mosaicists. There are three additional birth scenes in the narthex mosaics. As indicated in chap. 5 n. 22 above, when Rebecca gives birth to Isaac, she lies in bed to the picture's right and her head is modestly covered. By contrast, when Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, she rests at the picture's left, her hair still uncovered and decorated with a fillet. The case of Asenath's birth of Ephraim—she is Joseph's Egyptian wife, but is in no way sinister—is more complex. Her hair modestly covered, she lies to the picture's left, while Joseph stands to the picture's right with their firstborn, Manasseh, and accepts Ephraim (Demus, Mosaics of San Marco , 2: pl. 292), thus demonstrating a clear sense of familial and national hierarchy.

48. Weitzmann and Kessler, The Cotton Genesis , 58.

49. This passage's relevance to Gen. 1-3 is discussed by J. Bassler, "Adam, Eve, and the Pastor: The Use of Genesis 2-3 in the Pastoral Epistles," in Genesis 1-3 in the History of Exegesis , ed. G. A. Robbins, Lewiston, N.Y., and Queenston, Ont., 1988, passim, and by Clark, "Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve," 103. Scholars today do not attribute First or Second Timothy to Paul, but he is the traditional author.

50. E. C. McLaughlin, "Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes," 219-21.