Chapter Four
The First Couple in Paradise
The remainder of the narrative cycle fulfills the implications of Eve's disastrous creation, and her visual signification continues to be "difference." She appears at the picture's left in eight of her twelve scenes at San Marco, her pose a mirrored reversal of the Creator's. In only one episode is she in his active-agent posture, yet that scene represents her worst moment theologically, when she gives the fruit to Adam (see Fig. 20).
The scene following her creation is one of the few in which Eve is central and is therefore a crucial image. God presents Eve to the now alert Adam (Fig. 19), and we are momentarily reassured by her centrality and upright posture. She seems remarkably like God in her pose. But her passive female nature is clear from her stance, with both hands down at her sides, in contrast with those of the active males surrounding her.[1] God propels Eve forward with his right hand on her shoulder but, consistent with the Genesis text, is silent. Adam gestures appropriately with his right hand, for it is he who is given the authority by the dixitque formula to name
her "Woman" (Gen. 2:23). An ill omen surfaces here, for Adam stands for the first time at the picture's left and faces the opposite way from his pose in the Naming of the Animals (see Fig. 12). And visually, Eve is only an object, presented by one male while viewed and named by the other, the very act of her being named demonstrating that, like the animals, she is a creature to be mastered. Ironically, although Eve stands in the center of the composition, a position syntactically communicating dominance, she is powerless. For the rest of the narrative, her role will be marginal in terms of power and control, yet central to the denouement of human history.
The San Marco mosaics repeat many aspects of their model with remarkable veracity and completeness, particularly in the Creation cupola. Of the thirty-four relevant scenes included in the Cotton Genesis, this cupola omits only four. Surprisingly, we find among the few omissions God's admonition to Adam and Eve regarding the Tree of Knowledge, a scene that in the manuscript almost certainly immediately followed Eve's introduction to Adam. Weitzmann and Kessler reconstruct a single miniature with these two scenes, the admonition at the picture's right, followed by Eve conversing with the Serpent (Eve shown first and the Serpent last, at the picture's left). While the Vulgate text differs—for there God warns only Adam regarding the Tree, just after introducing him to Paradise, and prior to Eve's creation—most medieval accounts of the Fall, verbal and visual, logically emend the story to make both present; many images, including the fifth-century Cotton Genesis, comply.[2]
At San Marco, however, the mosaicists have deliberately altered this tradition. We saw already that the admonition was restored to it's original narrative location at Adam's Introduction into Paradise (see Fig. 10); the result of this is to enable the mosaicists to omit it here. The change from the model allows the viewer to account for Eve's greater weakness toward the Serpent, for she can know of the prohibition only secondhand from Adam.
The Serpent and the Blue Tree of Knowledge
The Serpent plays an important role in the Temptation of Eve (Plate II), and trees are once again significant. The mosaicists extensively rearranged the Cotton Genesis composition, allotting the privileged first position, most closely associated with the Creator, to the upright Serpent. This accords well with the Vulgate text, for the Serpent here is twice given the speaking formula also associated with God, the dixit cue (Gen. 3:1 and
3:4). Eve does not initiate conversation with the Serpent but only answers when spoken to ("cui respondit mulier," Gen. 3:2); thus her secondary position and reversed, mirror-image posture with right hand raised in speech are appropriate.[3] The mosaicists' repositioning also clarifies the hierarchy of authority. Further, the Serpent inhabits a blue tree that reveals his unenlightened and fallen nature and identifies him as the agent of Lucifer, the leader of the fallen angels who came into being when Light and Darkness were separated.[4] Weitzmann and Kessler suggest that the anomalous figure of Adam standing with his back to Eve is a vestige of the episode of God's admonition, now missing from the Cotton Genesis, but that he originally almost certainly came first in the frame, before Eve and the Serpent.[5] However, Adam's inclusion by the thirteenth-century mosaicists is not incidental, as these scholars imply; rather, it clarifies his role in the Fall.
Like Eve, the Serpent helps to explain Adam's fall from perfection, for he, too, functions as an intermediary in a chain of deception descending from Lucifer to Adam. The question of Eve's susceptibility to the Serpent's speech was thus an important one, and in this scene the compositional alterations from the Cotton Genesis manuscript make it more plausible. Moving the Serpent to the Creator's position heightens his authority in the image, and his placement in the blue tree, first seen next to Eve at her creation, suggests their immediate likeness. The idea of a natural affinity between the Woman and the Serpent—later to be abolished by a punitive Deity when he declares enmity between them—was affirmed by theologians such as Peter Comestor and his fifteenth-century English translator, William Caxton. Comestor explains the Serpent's addressing of Eve both by Eve's spiritual weakness and their physical affinity. First he writes that the Woman is "minus providam et certam, in vitium flecti aggressus est," which Caxton translates as "not so prudent and more prone to slide and bow,"[6] and then he suggests a further similarity between the Serpent and Eve that became enormously popular in medieval and renaissance art, although it was not used at San Marco. According to Comestor, the Serpent had the head of a female; thus Eve was more likely to listen to and trust this creature. At San Marco, this same affinity between the Woman and the Serpent is expressed differently, through the proximity of both to the blue tree at important moments in the narrative; the blue tree further connects both to the final link in the chain of disobedience, the proud Lucifer.[7]
It is traditional that the Serpent's tree is the Tree of Knowledge of
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Figure 20.
Eve Plucking the Fruit and Tempting Adam, detail
of the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
Good and Evil. Here its blue color reveals the tree's inherently closer kinship with evil and the fallen angels than with good. But puzzlingly, the trees against which Eve's body is silhouetted are specifically identifiable as fig trees, for in the following scene she will pluck fruit not from the blue tree but from a fig tree (Fig. 20); only later in the narrative does the blue tree reappear adjacent to the Tree of Life (see Fig. 24).[8] None of these trees, of course, corresponds botanically to the Tree of Knowledge depicted earlier in Adam's introduction to Paradise and his admonition (see Fig. 10), but all must be associated with Eve and the Serpent, with disobedience and evil. This ambiguity regarding the identity of the Tree could deny the exegetical position that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was actually poisonous and favor an alternative theory that the Tree itself was harmless but the act of disobedience brought death.[9] Evil is subtle and difficult for even a knowledgeable soul to recognize. The blueness of the tree emphasizes that privation of knowledge leads to disobedience; the fig remains innocent.
Adam is included in the scene of Eve's temptation but blatantly turns his back on both her and the Serpent, a kind of inside-out version of the extremely common and even formulaic scene in medieval art of Adam and Eve standing symmetrically to either side of the Serpent coiled around the Tree of Knowledge (see Plate 8). Unlike the Vulgate, the Hebrew text of Genesis and accounts such as Josephus's have the Serpent addressing Adam as well as Eve,[10] but here the mosaics assert that Adam is ignorant of any such encounter or, if he hears it, turns away. The mosaicists, by including an uninterested Adam rather than simply omitting him, powerfully reinforce his uninvolvement. Simultaneously, we understand the Serpent's logic in approaching Eve. Well established as the spiritually susceptible one, Eve will sin; her disobedience will ensnare the more godlike Adam.
The titulus above the Temptation of Eve , not an abbreviated version of the Vulgate text but, for the first time, an invented one, also exonerates Adam from guilt, laying the blame squarely on the Serpent and Eve. Astonishingly didactic and blunt, it chronicles the first human—and female—action carried out without the guiding presence of the Creator: "HIC SERPENS LOQVITVR EVE ET DECIPIT EAM ." It actually summarizes what will happen, for even before Eve plucks the fruit, eats (as she does in the fourth of the four Cotton Genesis miniatures omitted in the cupola), and gives it to Adam, we are informed that "Here the Serpent speaks to Eve and deceives her." The subtext is that Adam, present visually although uninvolved, and blatantly omitted from the text, is not deceived.[11] Oddly, he is gesturing with his right hand, which usually indicates speech, but does not seem to say anything. Adam actually speaks (dixit and ait ) only three times in Genesis and in addition names (appellavitque ) the animals, and all four occurrences appear here at San Marco with the appropriate gesture in the correct scene. But no speech exists to fit this speaking gesture.[12] The pose instead reminds the viewer at this crucial narrative juncture of Adam's essential similarity to the active-agent Creator. It also emphasizes by contrast Eve's backwardness and intensifies the soon-to-be-seen difference of Adam's altered posture during and after his sin.[13]
The inscriptions for the final nine scenes in the cupola, beginning here with the Temptation of Eve , are all invented, nonbiblical texts, and all begin with "HIC" ("Here"). This change comes at the same point in the account (Gen. 3:1) where the mood of the written narrative changes, by becoming historical after the ahistorical opening chapters. As Mieke Bal has noted in her studies of Genesis, the Serpent at this moment introduces the possibil-
ity of action into the story.[14] The text also substitutes the present-tense verb loquitur for the perfect-tense dixit , the word used in the Vulgate text. Unlike the visual language, which enhances the godlike authority of the Serpent by its pose and position within the composition, the titulus avoids the connotations of authority and finality offered by dixit; simultaneously, however, it brings the action into the world of the viewer's here and now.
Adam Sins
Adam's loss of his godlike perfection manifests visually through his changed posture and compositional placement in the scenes following Eve's Fall. We see this first in Eve Plucking the Fruit and Tempting Adam (see Fig. 20), a two-part scene that completes this multiepisodic version of the Fall. It opens with the Tree of Knowledge in the Deity's usual position, followed by a still retrograde Eve plucking a fig from it. A second scene follows in the same frame that places Eve first, before the fig, and turned toward Adam. About to sin, he stands to the picture's left and is retrograde, a simile for Eve in three of her four previous appearances. Eve, too, appears transformed, for she stands erect, right hand raised, on the privileged side at the picture's right of the scene, and facing Adam. This remarkable scene is the only mosaic in the entire cycle where Eve stands in the active-agent pose of the Creator.[15] The visual syntax asserts Eve's authoritativeness and demonstrates her resemblance to her Creator, but ironically her pose expresses her sin rather than positive traits. She acts out of evil pride—like the fallen angels, she aspires to be like the Creator—and her ambition results in the Fall. She has already eaten, her eyes are open fully, and she is briefly like God, "knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:5), just as the Serpent has promised her.[16] Although God later mentions only Adam ("Behold, Adam is become as one of us, knowing good and evil"; Gen. 3:22), the mosaicists remind us that Eve, too, attained this remarkable state of being.
But while the mosaic illustrates the truth of the Serpent's prediction, it emphasizes a key distinction from the Creator's pose. Eve stands in profile. She will appear in profile in four more of her seven remaining appearances (see Figs. 24–26 and Plate 2), conforming with the Byzantine convention of showing evil beings in profile so as to avoid the dangers of eye contact with the viewer.[17] Eve may have used her godlike authority to tempt Adam, but at this moment the mosaicists wish to prevent her interaction with us.
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Plate 1.
Creation cupola, thirteenth century, atrium of San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 2.
The Expulsion and the Labors of Adam and Eve, detail of the
Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 3.
Separation of Light from Darkness, detail of the Creation
cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 4.
Creation of the Heavenly Bodies, detail of the Creation cupola,
San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 5.
Blessing of the Birds and Marine Creatures, detail of
the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 6.
Animation of Adam, detail of the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 7.
Creation of Eve, detail of the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 8.
Fifth Day of Creation, Sixth Day of Creation, Creation of Eve,
and The Fall,
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Plate 9.
Jacopo Torriti, Creation of the Souls of Adam and Eve, c. 1290,
Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi.
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Plate 10.
Creation of the Souls of Adam and Eve, Creation of Adam, and
Creation of Eve (with story of Joseph below), Tuscan artists, c.
1270-90, baptistry of San Giovanni, Florence.
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Plate 11.
Temptation of Eve, detail of the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
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Plate 12.
God in the Act of Creation with His Compass, Holkham Bible
Picture Book, English
Jewish and Christian exegetes repeatedly addressed the question of why Adam sinned. Adam was not deficient from the moment of his creation, nor was he deprived of enlightenment and driven by a proud desire to be "like" his Creator. Adam's sin was explained differently. According to one popular tradition, it was the result of his love for Eve and his loyal desire to remain with her even after her error.[18] The mosaicists here align themselves with two other traditions, first, that Eve seduced Adam with words, and second, that Adam acted out of lust.[19] Eve uses both her hands in this important scene. Her right hand is raised, not because she just gave the fruit to Adam, but—as seen consistently in the visual syntax of these mosaics—to indicate speech. Oddly, at this point of high drama in the story, the Vulgate does not accord a speaking role to Eve. Speech, like the active-agent posture that represents it in the mosaics, is a form of validation for characters in the Old Testament, a privilege rarely accorded to either Adam or Eve. Eve speaks four times, once each in reply to the Serpent and God in Eden, and once each in her postlapsarian role of procreator and name-giver at the births of Cain and Seth, scenes omitted at San Marco, although present in the Cotton Genesis. She never, however, earns the dixit or ait formulas associated with the Creator and Adam.[20] The mosaicists here, by raising Eve's right hand and placing her in a posture of authority, convey that she spoke to Adam to beguile him, an interpretation consistent with God's later punishment of Adam, condemning him "because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife" (Gen. 3:17).
But the image hints at a second explanation for Adam's sin. Eve's left hand gestures downward toward Adam's pudendum, as does the gaze of her profiled head, a head posture not seen in adjacent depictions of her. Similar to God's pointing at Eve's pudendum during her forming, Eve's glance and gesture anticipate the roles that lust and Adam's corporeal nature will now play in human history. And her eyes here have opened to the shame of their nakedness while Adam's eyes have not; she sees and knows what Adam does not.
After the Fall
In Adam and Eve Covering Their Nakedness (Fig. 21), Adam appears first in the scene, but no longer in the imago dei . A sinner, his likeness to God is syntactically negated by his backward posture; he reaches into the fig tree for leaves, exactly echoing the figure of Eve plucking the fig in the previous
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Figure 21.
Adam and Eve Covering Their Nakedness, detail of the
Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
scene. Eve's posture is contorted; her head turns back toward Adam, her torso twists toward the succeeding scene, and one leg crosses over the other. This leg posture, common for Eve figures in medieval and renaissance art, is a visual simile for the Serpent winding around the Tree of Knowledge. It signifies the carnal/sexual nature of the sin inside her and will reappear in the figure of Potiphar's wife, the seductress in the Joseph story (Fig. 22). When God comes looking for Eve and Adam in the following scene, Adam and Eve Hiding from God (Fig. 23), her legs again overlap—unlike those of any other standing figure in the cupola—and her serpentine arms crisscross her twisted torso. Adam, also agitated, runs from the dignified and still static Creator. Having acquired divine knowledge, they are at this moment most like God, yet their twisted and bent postures here and in the successive scenes appear most ungodlike and reveal the enormity of their sin.[21] Adam's completely altered posture, aligned now with Eve's instead of God's, reveals immediately his state of sin. God calls
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Figure 22.
Potiphar Making Joseph Overseer, detail of the
second Joseph cupola, San Marco, Venice.
to Adam, his right hand raised in speech; Adam's reply comes similarly via his right hand. Insulting the Deity, the deceptive Eve, hiding but not speaking, raises her left hand toward him.
According to the Vulgate text, the Denial of Guilt (Fig. 24) immediately follows the speeches of God and Adam in the previous scene; however, the mosaicists deny the scene absolute proximity by seating God on an elaborate throne and changing the setting to the very center of Eden, where the Trees of Life and Knowledge grow. Although Adam and Eve are both still retrograde, Adam stands closer to the Tree of Life and God, suggesting once again that he is the more redeemable of the two first parents. The Tree of Knowledge reappears as a slim, erect blue tree, associated with the Serpent, Eve, and Darkness, and grows appropriately next to the Tree of Life, behind the throne of God, where it is protected from further encroachment by the first couple. The Serpent is omitted, although it traditionally appears in images of this scene, and art historians have remarked
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Figure 23.
Adam and Eve Hiding from God, detail of the Creation
cupola, San Marco, Venice.
its absence here. However, the San Marco mosaicists in this matter ally themselves with the Vulgate tradition, as reiterated and explained by writers like Comestor, rather than with some popular treatments of the narrative from the later Middle Ages that added an episode of God's interrogating the Serpent. Comestor's well-known view held that the Serpent was not questioned because he was only the agent of Lucifer, not Lucifer himself; we recall that the Serpent was present at God's blessing above (see Plate 5).[22]
The Vulgate text, beginning with the episode of Adam and Eve hiding, consists entirely of conversations, and the mosaicists represent each of these by appropriately postured figures in three successive images. The complexity of these closely spaced episodes warrants a careful look at the correspondence of words and images. In Adam and Eve Hiding (Fig. 23), God's right hand signals his one speech to Adam, asking where he is (dixit , Gen. 3:9b), while Adam's right hand indicates his answer (ait , 3:10). Eve
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Figure 24.
Denial of Guilt, detail of the Creation cupola, San Marco, Venice.
does not speak, but raises her left hand. In the Denial of Guilt (Fig. 24), all three actors gesture with right hands, and these gestures denote, respectively, God's asking Adam if he has eaten of the Tree (dixit , 3:11), Adam's reply that the woman gave him the fruit (dixit , 3:12), God's questioning of Eve (dixit , 3:13a, returning us to the Creator figure a second time), and finally Eve's reply that the Serpent deceived her (respondit , 3:13b). God immediately speaks to punish the wrongdoers in the Punishment of the Serpent, Eve, and Adam (Fig. 25). With raised right hand, he first curses the Serpent (ait , 3:14–15), then punishes Eve (dixit , 3:16), and finally Adam (dixit , 3:17–19).
Thus, in the Denial, God asks only Adam and Eve, not the Serpent, about what they have done, and both answer, though Adam still uses the godlike dixit and Eve the more passive respondit . Eve in the Vulgate does reply that the Serpent tempted her, but here the Latin text above the mosaic, again part of an invented text not derived from the Vulgate, ignores
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Figure 25.
Punishment of the Serpent, Eve, and Adam, detail of the Creation
cupola, San Marco, Venice.
the Serpent's role in her disobedience: "HIC DOMINVS INCREPAT ADAM IPSE MONSTRAT VXOREM FVISSE CAVSAM " ("Here the Lord rebukes Adam who himself shows that his wife was the cause"). In this version of the famous "passing the buck" scene, altered from the Cotton Genesis model by omitting the guilty Serpent, Adam speaks and points to Eve, laying the blame squarely on her.[23] Only her speech gesture—and, if viewers remembered, the corresponding Vulgate text—would attribute guilt to the Serpent, for visually Eve accepts her responsibility by not pointing elsewhere.[24] Her profiled face, contrasting with God's and Adam's, implies her guilt, and of course the mosaicists had prepared the viewers for her culpability since her creation. God's enthronement like a presiding judge, another detail altered from the fifth-century model, confirms the gravity of the moment and emphasizes the theme of accusation, trial, and judgment. His static, stately position contrasts with the submissively bent and agitated poses of Adam and Eve, visually reassuring us of his eternal divinity even at this moment,
when in the J text he appears less than omnipotent.[25] An eschatological passage from the Vita Adae et Evae may have provided a source for the mosaicists, for there, as soon as Adam eats, Eve relates:
And in the same hour, we heard the archangel Michael sounding his trumpet, calling the angels, saying, "Thus says the Lord, 'Come with me into Paradise and hear the sentence which I pronounce on Adam.'" And as we heard the archangel sounding the trumpet, we said, "Behold, God is coming into Paradise to judge us." ... And the throne of God was made ready where the tree of life was.[26]
The specification of locale—the middle of the Garden where both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are—further corresponds with the San Marco mosaic.
The Serpent, out of its tree with head lowered, reappears only in the Punishment of the Serpent, Eve, and Adam (Fig. 25), where it appears first in the scene, for God addresses it immediately following Eve's explanation in the previous episode. In a frontal, symmetrical composition reminiscent of a Last Judgment,[27] the centrally enthroned God gestures with his right hand, with Adam kneeling to his right and Eve to his left. As in the preceding scene, God's gesture represents a series of speeches, hierarchically addressed first to the lowly Serpent, then to Eve, and finally to Adam. But although both the text and the composition are hierarchically composed, the two, oddly, do not absolutely correspond. The lowliest of the characters, the Serpent more logically would be placed at the picture's left, lower than Eve. However, its unusual position—even farther to the picture's right than Adam himself—momentarily maintains the fast pace of the narrative, where the Serpent is the object of God's first curse, and its distance from Eve reflects the enmity God puts between the woman and the Serpent; at least its lowered head demonstrates its inferiority. Adam and Eve, now both static and in profile, remain appropriately displayed, Adam on the more honored and Eve on the more sinister side. The Latin text confirms that the artists knew the Serpent was cursed first, for it states, "HIC DOMINVS MALEDICIT SERPENTI CVM ADAM ET EVA ANTE SE EXISTENTIBVS " (Here the Lord curses the Serpent with Adam and Eve appearing before him).
In the following, very rarely depicted scene, God dresses Adam and Eve (Fig. 26), and the rigid, symmetrical composition retains the stern mood
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Figure 26.
God Dresssing Adam and Eve, detail of the Creation cupola,
San Marco, Venice.
of judgment established in the previous two episodes. God helps the still-profiled Eve with her garment as the already clothed Adam looks on, and the episode possibly refers to the early Christian notion that when God clothed Adam and Eve, they received their newly mortal corporeality.[28] Although in the next scene her clothing is identical to Adam's and easily covers her legs, here it exposes them. Bared legs were a sign of sexuality, and possibly the newly knowledgeable Adam's down-tilted head indicates his corporeal interest in Eve's naked limbs.[29]
The Expulsion and the Labors of Adam and Eve (see Plate 2)occupy the final frame of the lowest register of the cupola. The two episodes move easily from the viewer's left to right and reestablish the movement of the narrative after the more static preceding images. The first half of the frame is crowded, including initially the Tree of Life with a cross in its branches, two phoenixes, and a flaming sword below, followed by the erect figure of the Creator with two hands on Adam's shoulder pushing him and Eve out
the portal of Paradise. As in the scene of Eve's creation, the Tree of Life is a type for the Cross of Christ, for the Crucifixion will be the cure for the sin that led to Expulsion. As noted above, the reference to the wood of the Cross is probably also inspired by San Marco's own relic of the True Cross in its Treasury. The phoenixes represent the resurrected Christ and here are red, the color at San Marco associated with enlightenment and the good angels, who did not fall. They are, indeed, enlightened, for according to Jewish legend, Eve offered to share the forbidden fruit with all the animals, but only the phoenixes refused and so were allowed to stay in Paradise.[30]
The popular Vita Adae et Evae may again be a source for the mosaicists, in this case for a reordering of elements from the Cotton Genesis. Weitzmann and Kessler reconstruct the Cotton Genesis manuscript with a scene following the Expulsion and prior to the Labors of Adam and Eve of a cherub (or cherubim) outside Eden guarding the way back to the Tree of Life with a flaming sword, as described in Genesis 3:23–24.[31] San Marco, on the other hand, includes the flaming sword first in the scene below the Tree of Life and links the Tree to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, all in accordance with the text of the Vita . There, before Adam is expelled from Eden, the Lord warns him:
"You shall not now take from it [the Tree of Life]; for it was appointed to the cherubim and the flaming sword which turns to guard it because of you, that you might not taste of it and be immortal forever.... [But] if you guard yourself from all evil, preferring death to it, at the time of the resurrection I will raise you again, and then there shall be given to you from the tree of life, and you shall be immortal forever."[32]
Eve and Adam stand erect in the Expulsion and appear more dignified than in previous scenes, but both are in profile and make large gestures with their prominent left hands toward their new, extraparadisal environment. Their right hands hold the tools of their mundane trades, a mattock for Adam and a spindle and distaff for Eve. Eve looks back eagerly at Adam, showing him the world with which the Middle Ages associated her, the earthly realm. Her eagerness and gesture ironically echo those of the Creator in the Introduction of Adam into Paradise (see Figs. 10 and 11), the scene immediately above this one. In that scene God similarly turns and looks back toward Adam as he pulls him into the Eden from which he now expels the pair.
Eve's and Adam's bodies, covered by matching animal skins, stand closer together than in any other scene and appear identical. While they began their relationship as opposites, Eve representing the difference that heightened Adam's perfection, their shared sin finally unites them. Once again the viewer is reminded of apocalyptic imagery, specifically Judgment scenes, with damned souls pushed into the jaws of Hell. Here, though, God himself propels them toward the picture's lower left, the traditional location of Hell in Judgment images.[33] The cherubim, who in the Genesis text guard the way back to the Tree of Life, appear in the pendentives below the cupola, defending the cupola itself from violation by the descendants of Adam and Eve, depicted in the mosaics of the adjacent lunettes and barrel vault; one is located immediately below the portal itself (see Fig. 11). They also guard the Tree and the Garden from us, the viewers standing in the earthly realm below.