“Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve,” William Blake is said to have cried when Thomas Butts found him, naked though unashamed, at the end of his garden on Hercules Road in London.
It seems Blake was in the middle of reciting Milton’s Paradise Lost “in character.”1 Catherine, Blake’s wife, his printer and colourist, nude model and clothesmaker, was playing the part of Eve. She is reported once to have said: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.”
Blake would illustrate Adam and Eve “naked to the aire” for his patron Butts in 1808. Eve is fed mouth-to-mouth by the serpent entangling her in this dim Eden. Adam stands with his back turned, looking at lightning.
That memorable day in 1790s Lambeth, the Blakes were taking part in a long tradition of rehearsing the Fall of Man. A twelfth-century drama, written mostly in Anglo-Norman French, begins with the note:
Paradise should be set up in a prominent place. Curtains and silken draperies should be hung around it, so that the characters that are in paradise are visible only above the shoulders. Fragrant flowers and foliage should be strewn around. There should be various kinds of trees there, and fruits hanging from them, so that the place may seem very delightful.2
Paradise does look delightful in the Vienna Genesis, a sixth-century manuscript of the Book of Genesis that has lost its beginning and now opens just at our loss of innocence.
Beneath a block of Genesis text in Greek, trees bloom and fruit, stretching to shade Adam and Eve, and separate the moment before eating from the naked pair hiding their bits and concealing themselves in the bushes.
This Genesis story, of knowing nakedness and covering it, of fig leaves and garments of skins, has a good many holes. Questions of materials and labour need to be answered. And then there is the matter of how to show the clothing of Adam and Eve.
What is hidden within all the primordial foliage in the Vienna Genesis is the opening fallen act: the first pair sewing aprons for themselves out of fig leaves. These couldn’t have been easy to make or, as interpreters of Genesis have pointed out, very comfortable to wear. Philo of Alexandria contrasts the sweetness of figs with the roughness of their leaves; and Severian of Gabala explains that “Adam’s first skill was sewing.”
Nowhere have I found a scene of Adam or Eve making aprons with “the inventiveness of artisans.” Artists have them instead more dramatically clutching at greenery, too much filled with shame to bother with sewing. Genesis illustrations, disobedient like Eve, don’t always follow the text.
In any case, fig leaves wouldn’t do for what God had in store. Before their expulsion, God clothes the couple in garments of skins. The making of animal skins in a deathless Eden poses something of a problem. Some have thought they were actually made from the bark of a tree. Others have suggested rabbit fur or camel hair—or even the skin of the serpent.
Exegetes also want to reassure us that God was no tailor. Nor did he, as Severian is keen to clarify, “open a tannery.” Elsewhere we are recommended not to read of God making clothes with “bare literality.”
Walking out of Eden in the Vienna Genesis, the gate already blocked, Adam and Eve wear identical short tunics that are still the colour and shape of the original animals. Newly mortal, Adam and Eve are covered in death, a style that looks all the plainer against the dyed calfskin of the manuscript page, and beside the bright dress of the unknown woman ushering them east.
God only directs things from above in both of the framed scenes in the Vienna Genesis, his arm hanging out of the sky to find Adam and Eve and then follow through with their punishment. Yet in other manuscripts he plays a more active role, helping Eve wriggle into her tunic in a Bible illustration made around 1230 by the Oxford artist William de Brailes.
In this illumination from a dismantled and partly lost manuscript, Adam stands just behind Eve, having been clothed first.3 Adam—prophet, priest, and king—is put into the shift of a peasant. Looking up at God, Adam restrains his fruit-taking wrist. He’ll soon need this hand for toil.
In another William de Brailes manuscript with detached and scattered leaves, a dextrous God manages to clothe Adam and Eve both at once. To the right, the exiled pair get down to work: Adam is digging in the dirt while Eve makes a show of spinning. With a distaff between her legs she holds a spindle of thread.
Hard at work is how we leave them in a fifteenth-century Fall of Man drama written in Middle English. Eve says in a last line to Adam: “Ye must delve, and I shal spynne.”
So the first parents lived and laboured in pain for 930 years. Adam finally dies in Genesis 5:5. Eve’s death goes unrecorded, but is described in apocryphal continuations of her postlapsarian fate. In one of these, she outlives Adam by six days and, in her own final hours, calls her many children to her side.4 Ever persuasive, she commands them:
Make now tablets of stone and other tablets of clay and write in them all my life and your father’s which you have heard and seen from us.
Knowing how materials wear and that things sewn together come undone, Eve asks for two copies of this life to be made: one from clay in case of fire, the other in stone should there be a flood.
How hard these artists had to struggle to make sense of all those impossibilities, Beatrice - as you wonderfully succeed in pointing out. It's laughable. Yet as Adam and Eve concoct their fig leaf aprons in the Vienna Gospel particularly, the artist has managed to convey something so movingly real in the apprehension and distress on their faces.