Complicit in the Curse

They stumble. While a verdant landscape is watered generously behind their backs, the ground they step onto is dusty and littered with rocks. Adam points guiltily to his mouth, which has received the forbidden fruit. Eve shiftily half-conceals that fruit, with its visible bite marks, behind her back. Humanity’s first parents are monumental in size, and fill the picture. Or nearly so; but the edges matter. We need to read them carefully. They are framed to left and right by two tree trunks. It seems likely that these are the two great and dangerous trees of Eden: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life. They are like the door jambs of a portal between blessing and curse. And a tiny detail, easily missed, is that the left-hand tree has had a branch lopped off it. Why would a branch need cutting in Eden, in which no toil was necessary and no disease was present? Who cut it, and why? Might it be a symbol of how Adam and Eve themselves have severed themselves from the true source of their life, and must now await a new grafting? Like Goliath, big people fall hard. Seeming too large for the space that they inhabit (Heard & Whitaker 2011), the postures of Adam and Eve suggest an insecure purchase on the new ground they feel beneath their feet. Their body weight is not well distributed. Their feet are not well placed. And their arms are intertwined in a fashion that echoes the sinuous curl of the serpent who discreetly entwines himself with the branch above them, greedily witnessing their fall. Although he occupies the upper margin of the painting, he is a key to its interpretation, for the positions of Adam’s and Eve’s arms become a sort of assimilation to the serpent. And as they take on some of his oblique movements their next moves also become ambiguous. There is a touching attempt at mutual support in their embrace, but also the physical expression of complicity, and ironically a mutual destabilization. References Heard, Kate, and Lucy Whitaker. 2011. Catalogue entry adapted from The Northern Renaissance. Dürer to Holbein (London: Royal Collection Publications), available at https://www.rct.uk/collection/407615/adam-and-eve [accessed 17 June 2022]