Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve, 1526. Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London, oil on panel, 117 x 80.5 cm.
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) painted during the early German Reformation in ducal courts at Wittenberg and elsewhere in Saxony. His work was transitional in that it often retained some Northern traits of relict Medievalism while bringing Renaissance realism and humanism to many of his subjects, especially mythological personae and biblical narratives. This pictorial hybridity might not be unusual in a German principality distant from Renaissance Italy, essentially an aesthetic balancing act for Cranach when “the spirit of reform was to be hostile to Renaissance eroticism.” (1) On the other hand, biblical texts made possibly salacious nude subjects like Adam and Eve acceptable.
Cranach’s Adam and Eve (1526) is one of quite a few versions of this biblical story he produced, a conflated visual ekphrasis from the narrative of Genesis 3, also in this case an amalgam of devotional meaning and exquisite artistic invention. (2) In the main, Cranach follows the narrative iconographically. Cranach depicts the Garden of Eden, where the serpent – apparently a spade-headed viper to boot - sinuously hangs from the fruitful Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In typical Hebrew literary fashion, the subtlety of the serpent is manifest in a clever exposition of developing the art of lying. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1). Here the Hebrew word for “crafty or cunning” is ערומ ‘arûm, intensified by the superlative מכל mikkol“more than any other”, which Cranach’s friend Martin Luther would have known as calladiorfrom the Latin Vulgate although his 1523 German Bible translation mostly used the GreekSeptuagint via Erasmus. (3) Among Cranach's engravings and woodcuts, his other endeavor, he also shows an earlier, more traditionally German rendering for this biblical moment.
Lucas Cranach, Adam and Eve, woodcut, 1509.
Some see in Gen. 3 a crescendo of increasing dissembling and planned deceit, commencing with the lie by exaggeration (its familiar partner being the lie by omission). The serpent disingenuously converses with Eve, initiating as if a talking snake is commonplace, implanting doubt. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1). Here the serpent conveniently emphasized not the positive of what God provided but only the negative of what was banned, and grossly stretched at that. In the narrative with Adam and Eve, God only barred one tree from their diet (Gen. 2:17), the one in question and under which Cranach places his version of the story. This certainly caught Eve’s attention. Eve, thus ensnared and showing the result of already beginning to doubt God’s benevolence, partly “corrects” the serpent but adds her own error long before tasting the fruit, going to the other extreme in another lie by exaggeration : “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said ‘You cannot eat of it, or even touch it, because in that day you will die.’ ” (Gen. 3:2-3). The "not even touching" is her exaggeration. The serpent responds with the lie by negation, “You shall not surely die in that day,” (Gen. 3:4) and adds the possible lie by distortion, “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened...” (Gen. 3:4a), thus possibly distorting what "eyes opened" (and to what) might mean. The serpent follows this with the final whopper lie by fabrication, “…and you will be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4b), contingent on what being "as gods" means. Ironically, later commentators suggest the Devil may tell a little truth in order to promote a greater lie. On the other hand, there is sufficient interpretive "truth" that the serpent may not be so much lying, but rather proposing some form of godlikeness too easily accessible but only in a limited way; certain kinds of knowledge would be epistemologically limited to deity, and humans would always be a far cry from gods. Experiential knowledge did not transform humans into gods. Of course, the serpent says "be like gods", not "be gods". Evidently this kind of logic was irresistible for Eve in three quick steps now that she had swallowed the theological ad hominem bait. “For she saw the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eyes and desirable for making one wise. She took of the fruit, ate it, and gave also to her husband, and he ate. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked…” (Gen. 3:6-7).
This is the moment Cranach illuminates, the climax of Eve having tasted and handing the fruit to Adam. Eve looks so knowing, appearing like the cat that swallowed the bird, and now looks downright crafty herself. Adam, however, isn’t in the know yet, so he scratches his head stupidly with his left hand, the exact opposite of Eve. The painterly complementarity is heightened by their skin tones, with earthy Adam the color of soil as his name implies in Hebrew (אדמ ’adam “man” and אדמה ’adamah “ground”) and Eve the hue of palest marble, as in Egyptian and even Greek art. With her left arm bending down the branch, she passes the fruit with her right hand to puzzled Adam who reaches for it, vacantly not looking exactly at Eve, or perhaps equally at the forbidden fruit, whereas Eve now looks slyly and directly at him.
Other intriguing details suggest traces of Medieval scholasticism - from which some conservative Protestantism had sprung rather than from Renaissance humanism - still somewhat prevalent in Saxony. For example, the Latin Vulgate translates the Hebrew “fruit”פרי perî as fructus (from the Greek Septuagint as καρπος), which many Medieval commentaries and artistic depictions often render as an apple. This is mostly because apple,malum in Latin, is nearly homophonous with Latin malus as “evil” – malum is also a neuter adjective or case ending for “evil”; sometimes the only difference is the length of the uvowel, entrenched when Medieval taxonomy identified the apple as Malus pumila. (4) This near equivalence of interpretation is in accord with the principle of linguistic similitude, in other words, Medieval scholiastic lexical root fallacies could drive hermeneutics. The 12th century French play Mystère d’Adam explicitly refers to the forbidden fruit of Eden as apple. Cranach’s fruit is ambiguous but could certainly be an apple as often suggested, and many examples of the fruit here - especially on the lowest branches - seem too elliptical to be citrus or other fruit. According to Gaster, medieval superstition held that even the sap of an apple tree could cause conception in a previously barren woman. (5) The apple was often symbolic of fertility from at least the Classical world onward. Greek lyrical poetry like Sappho's often makes the connection of apples to love gifts. But here in Eden, too much knowledge was not empowering but ultimately limiting, the tradeoff being fatal with ensuing mortality. It may be biologically necessary in human evolution that when we are finally capable of reproduction we are also at the point when the number of old cells dying begins to catch up with the number of new cells being formed, otherwise known as the aging process.
The animals in Cranach's painting are not mentioned in the biblical text other than as beasts previously named by Adam, but none are found in this passage by name, so other reasons for his including them are merely speculative. Medieval bestiaries derived from the ClassicalPhysiologus often suggested moral lessons associated with certain animals. The majority of animals in Cranach’s foreground around Adam and Eve are artiodactyls or similar mammals, horned beasts like the stag and its mate and a pair of male and female gazelles, in direct symmetry with Adam and Eve. These particular beasts and stags in particular are also often allegorically symbolic of lust, rampant desire and concupiscence in medieval bestiaries. The boar, also present here behind Eve, often corresponds with gluttony or desire for food (“she saw the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eyes” Gen. 3:6), and the sheep behind Adam can often be emblematic for docility or even stupidity (he is ignorant until tasting the fruit). (6) The idiosyncratic animal moral allegories Cranach may have implied were often shared by his age. The presumptive medieval syllogism would go something like this: eating the forbidden “evil” fruit is sinful and eating it imparts knowledge - especially a revelation that they are naked – therefore it must be imbued carnal knowledge partaken here. If the medieval idea – not at all necessarily biblical from ancient texts - of clerical celibacy impinges herein, carnal knowledge itself may be suspect or even sinful. Therefore this new knowledge was perceived as the sin of carnal knowledge and somehow contemporary viewers and text readers could have been meant to infer that an originally forbidden sexuality may have been involved in the Fall of Adam and Eve from Grace. This peculiar interpretive hang-up was quickly reinforced in Gen. 4:1 in that once banished from Eden, when Adam has sex with his wife Eve and she conceives a son Cain, the text reads literally, “And the man knew his wife Eve and she conceived and bore a son…” The Hebrew verb ידע yada‘ usually translates “knew” for their sexual union. So much for dogmatic literalism.
Another corroborating detail is that usually Adam and Eve cover their nakedness themselves by the textual fig leaves as read in Gen. 3:7b. This is a fascinating biblical parallel because figs are often visually synonymous with testicles in Mediterranean cultural puns, but also uniquely flower internally, akin to female ovulation, (7) as if physical resemblance might determine semantic choices even in the biblical narrative. Cranach’s tree, however, has a fertile grapevine bearing clusters of grapes covering their genitals. The indirect link is that grapes produce inebriating wine, also a biblical allegory of desire inCanticum Canticorum (Song of Songs) 4:10, “your lovemaking is better than wine.” (8)
Cranach has concocted here a conflation of biblical textuality, Renaissance anatomical realism and perhaps some theologically rich, even if Medieval at times, interpretative details in his Adam and Eve, choosing the moment of mutual quandary and resulting horrific consequence before Eden is lost to humanity. If Cranach's religious vision is mostly tied to Reformation conservatism, it should be no surprise given his close relationship with Martin Luther. Here the serpent both uncoils downward and looks down, almost appearing to some commentators like a Medieval illuminated capital letter, albeit apropos in inversion, for the sinister letter S in Latin Serpens and, for them, Satan's name also read therein in eisegesis (since Satan is not read in this early text but only in subsequent biblical texts to which they suggest this text is proleptic). This downward direction of the serpent is for them allusive of his own future where he will henceforth crawl (Gen. 3:14) in the divine curse this painting leads toward, an imagined landscape immediately beyond this visual narrative of a lush Eden that will soon become only a trope for lost innocence.
Notes:
(1) George Holmes. Renaissance. (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1996). London: Phoenix / Orion House, 1998, 207.
(2) Caroline Campbell, ed. Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007. This is most likely the best explication of the painting and its meanings in the Anglophone world.
(3) Philip Baldi and Pierlugi Cuzzolin. New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009, 211.
(4) Charlton Lewis and Charles Short. A New Latin Dictionary (from Freund’s Latin-German Lexicon), 1907, 1104.
(5) T. H. Gaster. Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament. New York: Harper and Row, 1969, §333, 812. He was primarily pointing to superstition in the medieval Jewish community.
(6) Pliny, Historia Naturalis 8.41 [stag]; Margaret B. Freeman. The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of New York / E. F. Dutton, 1976, 74 [stag]; A. H. Collins.Symbolism of Animals and Birds in English Church Architecture. New York: McBride and Nast, 1913, 8, as an uprooting, devouring beast [boar] and in Isidore of Seville,Etymologies, De Animalibus, XII.i.125 [boar], XII.i.9 [sheep].
(7) Maud Grieve. A Modern Herbal, vol 1. New York: Dover, 1971, 311.
(8) Patrick Hunt. “Sensory Images in Song of Songs.” Beiträge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des Antiken Judentums, Band 28. XIVth IOSOT Congress at Sorbonne-College de France, Paris, 1992. Frankfurt, 1996, 73.
Copyright © 2009 Dr. Patrick Hunt
Stanford University
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