The Creation of Eve
The next scene, a double one including both the Taking of the Rib and the Forming of Eve (see Plate 7), is one of the most remarkable and inventive scenes in the cupola. The bucolic Garden of Paradise is replaced by a dark forest, as the openness and prominent gold sky of the previous images are
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Figure 13.
Michelangelo, Creation of Eve, detail from the Sistine
Chapel ceiling, 1508-12, Rome, The Vatican.
from now on shaded by dense foliage. Artists frequently indicate a change of scene for Eve's creation; typically, as here, the protagonists enter a more mundane realm, and the Deity takes on more of the characteristics of the earth-inhabiting, J-text personality. In a Parisian manuscript of about 1250 (Plate 8), God the Creator shifts from being outside the circular cosmos as he creates it to inside the pictorial frame when he forms Eve, while Michelangelo's Deity in his Sistine Chapel ceiling flies majestically in the first four scenes of Creation but descends to stand on earth when he calls forth Eve from Adam's side (Fig. 13). Suggestive of the gravity of these events, there is a slowing of narrative pace with the Taking of the Rib and the Forming; for the first time, a single frame has two distinct episodes within it.
The Taking of the Rib immediately establishes Eve's inferior nature, and curiously, to do this, it shows both Adam and God in somewhat debased states. First, the scene breaks with all previous postural conventions
regarding both Adam and the Deity and establishes a sense of reversal. In a deliberate inversion of the probable composition in the Cotton Genesis, Adam rather than God appears first, and his classical posture of sleep, cutting diagonally across the corner of the composition, disrupts the repeated rhythm of vertical stances we have seen thus far. The Creator leans over him, turning to remove the rib, and for the first and only time is in profile—a posture traditionally associated with evil and rarely used for God in medieval art.[5] No longer standing statically or seated majestically, the Deity assumes a very human and momentary posture of movement; the only visual simile within the cupola is that of Adam the sinner, laboring after his expulsion (see Plate 2). The fact that God removes a rib from Adam's left side, rather than the more common—and symbolically positive—right side, is also significant. Typically in thirteenth—century art and theology, the taking of the rib to create Eve and her subsequent marriage to Adam were seen as types for the later creation of Ecclesia from the side wound of the new Adam, Christ, and their union.[6] However, this mosaic expresses a binary opposition between Eve and Ecclesia, for by the later Middle Ages Christ's side wound was well established as being on his right side, while his left side at the Crucifixion was associated with Ecclesia's antagonist, Synagoga. The reversal at San Marco of the positions of God and Adam, a deliberate change from the model and an interruption of the narrative flow, allowed the mosaicist to have God separate a rib from Adam's sinister, left side. Thus Eve is condemned even before her creation.[7] The reversal of the figures further directs the viewer's attention downward, where Adam's left hand seems to clutch the earth from which he was made and where a grapevine grows. The fact that Adam sleeps during the rib removal further damns Eve, for sleep was associated with the abandonment of rational faculties in favor of sensual pursuits.[8] The mosaicists, cognizant of this tradition, take care specifically to remind us of Adam's imperfect state during Eve's "birth" through inclusion of a simile; in the adjacent barrel vault lies the naked and drunken Noah, planter of the grapevine, sleeping in a pose similar to Adam's at Eve's creation (Fig. 14).[9]
The tree that grows behind Adam, as though from his side, is identical in form to the Tree of Life in the Garden above, and both it and the grapevine refer to future events in human history. They are typological references to the death by crucifixion on a tree of the new Adam, Christ, and
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The Drunkenness and Death of Noah, east half of
north vault, San Marco, Venice.
to the Eucharist, wherein the body that was sacrificed will save humankind. Thus before the woman is even formed, we are forewarned that she and consequently Adam will sin, necessitating that a new Adam come to save humanity from the folly she initiates. Here lies the old Adam, still immortal. But the soil clenched in his left hand will become accursed, no longer a place of rest but of toil, and his sleep reminds us of his subsequent mortality and return to that same earth he clutches, from which he was made. His burial place, according to legend, will be the eventual site of the Crucifixion, and from either seeds of the Tree of Life or a branch of the Tree of Knowledge planted in his dead remains will grow the tree that will supply the wood of that Cross.[10] By the thirteenth century, both Western and Byzantine images of the Crucifixion show the Tree of Life and/or the Cross growing from the side of a reclining Adam, similes of the posture and tree here, and some examples specifically depict the Fall of Adam and
Eve as taking place at the base of that Tree-Cross, establishing clearly the typological links between it and Redemption.[11] But it is quite unusual that at San Marco the earlier scene of Eve's creation—not Adam and Eve's actual sin—is used as the antitype for the Crucifixion. The opposition established here is between two bodies: Eve's, associated with carnality and the sin of the Fall, and Christ's mortified corpus, which will offer redemption through the ritual of the Eucharist.
The second half of the scene depicts the Creator actually "building" Eve, and we now see her for the first time (see Plate 7). It is ironic that both the Hebrew text and the Vulgate following it use architectural terms for the making of Eve (Gen. 2:22), while humble potter's terms were used for Adam, for the mosaicists' visualization of the text does not elevate Eve's formation above Adam's.[12] Once the bent-over Creator removes the rib from Adam at the picture's right, the creation of Eve's body occurs at the picture's left. First stands God, once again erect, forming her shoulder with his right hand while holding her wrist with his left. She turns toward him, also erect, and stares blankly. Her creation, like Adam's, is shown in two parts, but God makes no obvious gesture here of giving her first a body and then a soul.
Demonstrating differences between the creations of God's two creatures was important to medieval theologians, because it helped to establish that, while Adam is made in the image of God, this is not quite the case with Eve.[13] Adam's creation occurs before Eve's and results in a unique being; hers follows his and yields a derivative and even defective creature. Orthodox writers admitted that Eve had a soul, but their discussions all reveal remarkable ambiguity toward women and the body. Augustine, for example, concludes that, while both Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, Adam's soul is superior because it possesses the higher reasoning capabilities of sapientia , the ability to understand divine truths. Eve's exhibits inferior capabilities, functioning only on the lower level of scientia , or sense perception. For him, Adam is superior and associated with the soul, Eve weaker and associated with the body.[14] Peter Abelard, one of the least misogynist of medieval writers, states first that Adam and Eve were equals prior to the Fall, but then inexplicably accuses Eve of inferior moral judgment, caviling that "man is called His image, but woman only His likeness."[15] Thomas Aquinas, writing about the same time that the narthex mosaics were being worked on and espousing similar ideas, concludes that
the female is a defective version of the male, possessing the imago dei in an inferior way, and that her secondary creation from Adam's body confirms her subordination to man.[16] Nontheological writers applied these ideas to the fields of law and medicine; for example, a thirteenth-century political tract states, "Man is created in God's image, but woman is made in man's image and for that reason are women subject to men by natural law."[17]
While specifics vary from writer to writer, the essential difference with regard to Adam's and Eve's natures lies in the binary opposition of "spiritual" and "carnal." Understanding Eve to be "of the body" is a commonplace in medieval theology and is linked to her later "seduction" of Adam and her role as mother of all humans.[18] At San Marco, this idea is expressed in the Latin text above this scene of her forming, where the word "CARNE [M ]" ("flesh") is placed directly above her figure. Only those relatively few who were verbally literate could read it, but it would cue a preacher, for example, to recall Eve's identity with the flesh. But this idea is also expressed visually, for immediately to Eve's left and overlapped by her left arm grows a striking blue tree. The later appearance of the Serpent in this blue tree confirms its connection to Lucifer and the fallen angels from Day One of Creation and to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree long associated with unenlightenment and carnal and sexual knowledge. Like the nearby Tree of Life next to Adam, it stands appropriately in the middle of the Garden, but its qualities oppose those of the Tree of Life, just as Eve's oppose Adam's.
San Marco owned a relic of the True Cross that was miraculously preserved during a fire in 1231,[19] and probably the veneration of this famous relic inspired the special attention to tree symbolism in the cupola mosaics. The juxtaposition in Eve's Creation of two opposed trees—of Life and of Knowledge—reflects popular and well-known thirteenth-century iconographies of paired trees. For example, while Eve is associated with the Tree of Knowledge that brings death, Eve's antitype, Mary, is associated with the Tree of Jesse and the generation of Christ. The pictorial formula for this latter, a prophecy of salvation, includes a prone figure with a tree sprouting from his side, a simile recalled to the visually literate viewer by the sleeping Adam with the Tree of Life.[20] The paired trees in Eden probably allude as well to the Tree of Virtues and the Tree of Vices, another popular allegory (Figs. 15 and 16).[21] These trees bear the old Adam and the new Adam, Christ; the root of the Tree of Vices is Pride, the sin most
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Figure 15.
Tree of Vices, Defructibus carnis et spiritus, second
quarter twelfth century, Salzburg, Universitatsbibliothek, MI 32, for 75v.
commonly recognized as the cause of the Fall, while that of the Tree of Virtues is Humility. When depicted in manuscripts, the paired trees typically appear on the verso of one side and its adjacent recto; labels on the two images oppose many of the contraries we have discussed here: dextera and sinistra , good and evil, Ecclesia and Synagoga, fruits of the spirit and fruits of the flesh. Verbal and visual treatments of these trees are many and varied, but the mosaicists show their knowledge of several of these conventions by their intentional opposition of Adam and the Tree of Life to Eve and the Tree of Knowledge.
This message of Eve's inherent inferiority and difference is asserted by the visual syntax of this two-part scene of her creation, for the composition and gestures, as well as the iconographic themes, all emphasize Eve's separateness from Adam. It is more common among both the Cotton Genesis
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Figure 16.
Tree of Virtues, Defructibus carnis et spiritus, second,
Salzburg, Universitatsbibliothek, MI 32, fol. 76r.
recension—other than the Cotton Genesis itself—and other medieval images of Eve's creation to depict a single scene showing her body in the process of emerging from the side of Adam. Why did the mosaicists alter the model by conflating two scenes into a single frame yet retain the model's unusual two-part creation? Their split-yet-combined composition allows these dualities between male and female, Ecclesia and Eve, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, to reverberate from side to side of the composition and highlights our sense of Eve's otherness and her separation from Adam. As noted above, the other creatures of God were paired as males and females, with overlapping, unified bodies; their maleness and femaleness were seen as two aspects of the same thing. This symbiosis is avoided visually for Adam and Eve until after they sin, even though the text states that God and Adam are searching for a suitable mate for Adam
because he is alone. Had the mosaicists made the more traditional depiction of Eve's creation, with her body being drawn forth from Adam's, they would have formed a two-headed body similar to those of the other creatures and thus asserted close affinities between the natures of Adam and Eve.
The mosaicists also explain visually what theologians strained for centuries to understand: how could a creature as perfect as Adam fail? This motivational problem in the narrative is solved at San Marco by creating an Eve who was less than Adam from the moment of her birth. Using hindsight gained from a later point in the narrative, where Eve desires knowledge and is deceived, the mosaicists emend the story to show her at birth as lacking in knowledge and susceptible to deception; because of her postlapsarian punishment of carnal desire for her husband and childbearing, they create in her prelapsarian state an inherent affinity for the tree associated with carnal knowledge.[22]
The inclusion of a blue Tree of Knowledge at Eve's birth may be unique in the history of art, yet the ideas it reflects are of Augustinian origin, and the motif relates closely to other Italian images primarily of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In one of the same passages referred to above, where Augustine identifies the angel-day observers with the Light of the first day and sees them as representing knowledge, he further suggests that Adam's and Eve's souls were made on Day One and stored away until later joined with their bodies in Genesis 2.[23] Nine Umbrian-Roman Creation cycles include this unusual event of the creation of the souls of Adam and Eve, an Augustinian scene that precedes the traditional images of Adam's and Eve's bodily creations (Plates 9 and 10 and Fig. 17).[24] In these representations, all hierarchically composed to show the picture's honored right and less-honored left on either side of the central Deity, Adam's and Eve's souls are shown as nude males and females, red and blue respectively, and in most they are surrounded by red and blue mandorlas. In several, the red figure is distinguished from the blue because it emits rays of light. In five examples, God blesses the red being to his right (Adam's soul) and condemns or simply gestures toward the blue soul to his left (Eve's). This tradition, related to that in the San Marco mosaics, similarly attributes binary spiritual qualities of enlightenment and darkness to the first parents from the moment of their creation. Even more important, it aligns their souls with the other events of Day One, specifically, with the creation and fall of the good and bad angels. Four examples, including the earliest from
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Figure 17.
Creation of the Souls of Adam and Eve, seventeenth-century copy
of the lost fresco in St. Paul's, Rome, c. 700, Rome, Biblioteca Vaticana,
Cod. Barb. 4406, fol. 25r.
about 700 (Fig. 17), heighten the opposition between Adam and Eve by showing Eve's soul turning away from God in a pose that anticipates both her traditional Expulsion posture and that of the condemned in Last Judgment scenes.[25] All four were monumental, public images, and three were located in Rome and so could have been of interest to Venice owing to the city's revival as the New Rome. The fourth, by the Roman school artist Jacopo Torriti for San Francesco in Assisi (see Plate 9), heightens Eve's binary opposition to the Virgin Mary, who was herself immaculately conceived. While this latter idea was a matter of controversy in the thirteenth century, it was championed by prominent Franciscans. Torriti's fresco showing Eve's defective nature faces Mary at the Annunciation on the opposite wall of this Franciscan church and reminds the viewer of this difference; the sin of the old Eve will be cured by the new.
The San Marco mosaicists seem not to specify that Adam's and Eve's souls were made on Day One, yet they refer to this binary alignment of the first couple's souls with the good and bad angels by including the reference to the red and blue angels on Day One and by juxtaposing Eve with the blue tree at her creation. This theological position on the nature of Eve's soul was widely held by contemporary theologians, for example by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologica of about 1265–72. Like the mosaicists in Venice, he draws on Augustine but also modifies the patriarch's positions. Aquinas regards Adam as the unitary ancestor of humans,
consisting of both male spirit and female corporeality, and understands Eve's creation to be a separation of that female corporeality from him. Less pessimistic and dualistic than Augustine, Aquinas nonetheless still defines Adam's nature as essentially linked to his rational soul, while Eve's remains linked to the body and procreation.[26] Adam and Eve were not created simultaneously as the other paired animals were because Eve's creation from the rib of the already formed Adam confirms her subordination and inferiority. Females are defective males, passive where males are active, and deficient in intellect. While both are made in the image of God—and here Aquinas qualifies his statement, as did all theologians—the male possesses that image in a superior way, just as there are superior and inferior angels.[27] We see this position of separate and unequal at San Marco, and interestingly, because it is unlikely that Aquinas's views could have been formulated in time to influence the mosaicists in the first cupola, we see the same comparison between male and female humans and the good and bad angels.
Finally, an important gesture overlooked by scholars confirms Eve's carnal nature. For the creations of both Adam and Eve (see Fig. 8 and Plate 7), the Creator forms their bodies with his right hand while holding their wrists in a gesture of restraint with his left.[28] God's left hand on Adam's arm, awkwardly positioned but clearly pointing, gestures upward in the general direction of Adam's head; as Aquinas and many others define his role, "the man is the head of the woman."[29] God's left hand on Eve's arm, by contrast, points down toward her pudendum; we have seen that the word immediately above her is "CARNE [M ]" and that her inferior soul is linked to generation. As with Michelangelo's later Eve (Fig. 18), who raises her middle finger toward her own "port of sin," we see a foretelling here of where Eve's destiny will lie. Following the Fall, Adam will rename the woman "Eve," the mother of all living (Gen. 3:20), and her role will be procreation. Once again it is Augustine who underlies the theological perspectives of the San Marco program, for he indicates that God had foreseen from the beginning that "Eve bore history within her womb ."[30]
This acceptance of the male/spirit-female/body dualism, a denial of Eve's perfection prior to the Fall, explains the Fall. Like the fallen angels, Eve was created good by God, but because of her inferior reason, pride overtakes her; thus weakened, she exercises her free will and sins, falling into darkness. The story as depicted here is not really a developmental one, where we move from initial perfection to imperfection, but essen-
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Figure 18.
Michelangelo, detail from The Fall of Adam and Eve,
Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508-12, Rome, The Vatican.
tially etiological, for we see why Eve failed.[31] The creations of Adam and Eve, then, are like those of Light and Darkness, of the firmament and the earth, of the sun and the moon. All are acts of separation and privation. Adam's and Eve's bodies will remain opposites—at different sides of compositions, facing each other rather than in parallel—until sin first brings them closer together (see Figs. 23 and 24) and finally the act of conceiving the murderous Cain joins them (see Fig. 28).
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Figure 19.
Introduction of Eve to Adam, detail of the Creation
cupola, San Marco, Venice.