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

Image has been removed. No rights.

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.