medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> On Thursday, March 10, 2005, at 8:22 am, Marjorie Greene wrote:
>> It's a bit of a puzzle since, if they haven't eaten yet, why are
they (clearly) conscious of their nakedness? This seems to be a before-
and-after Fall composite.
> > site:>http://tinyurl.com/538o3
From: John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>
> In a word, prolepsis (in the sense of "the describing of an event as
taking place before it could have, the treating of a future event as if
it had already happened").
one way of looking at this is as the iconographic analogue of the very, very
common stylistic device of simultaneously displaying an object --chair, city,
or (as here) a human body-- from multiple angles at once.
of course, the standard explanation for suchlike "mistakes" is that middlevil
artists were just Incompetent, until the Renaissance brought Light to All and
taught them how to draw stuff right.
(right. bridges are for sale all over Southern Indiana for any folks who
believe *that* rubbish.)
the conflation of several (chronologically) distinct actions is also not too
uncommon, and various depictions of this scene of The Temptation are ideally
suited for such.
here are a few, mostly from the late m.a. and later (the one from Paris
cathedral is surely the work of Viollet-le-Duc, c. 1860 or so)
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topics/AdamNeve/
there are particularly interesting ones in the Carolingian/Ottonian period (in
the "Bible of St. Paul's Outsid-the-Walls" and on Berward's doors at
Hildesheim?) which i can't seem to find at present, which show us, in comic
strip fashion, God bracing Adam for his Transgression, who then points the
finger (literally) to Eve, who in turn points the the hapless Serpent.
at Etampes, in the mid-12th c.,
http://christophersbookroom.com/cc/etampes/etscr1.jpg
Eve is taking the "apple" from the mouth of the "serpent", while Adam seems to
be holding one in his hand, and, almost within the same compositional space,
the two are being "Shown the Door" of the Garden by an Angel holding a Firey
Sword (which undulates rather like a flame and was surely originally painted
red).
c
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