Lesson 43

Adam and Eve

Have you ever noticed that all the representations of Adam and Eve, and there
are a lot of them, are depicted with navels? Of course they shouldn’t have
navels, being the first human beings (well, there was Lilith, Adam’s first wife
but that’s another story). God formed Adam out of “the dust of the ground” and
causing “a deep sleep to fall on Adam“; God took one of his ribs and fashioned a
woman, later to be called Eve. So not exactly a traditional birth for either of
them – and consequently no navels.

The painters of Adam and Eve were male and had little to do with childbirth, so
they would not necessarily have understood the function of the navel or how it
was formed, as not all artists had the enquiring scientific mind of Leonardo. Then
again, art comes from art, and the conventions of painting will always override
the observed world.

In the Renaissance it was of great importance to render the human body
anatomically correct and the subject of Adam and Eve was central to Dualism.
Dualism was the contradictory coming together of Christianity and the Humanism
(Paganism) of antiquity. What these paintings actually seem to represent is the
contemporary ideal of male and female beauty and by looking at a series of
Garden of Eden paintings we can see how this ideal has changed over the
centuries. What interests me is how little the male ideal form has changed since
Greek antiquity and conversely how much the female form has transformed.

From Rubens’ plump women to the waif of the 20th century the female figure has
transformed. Fat, thin, small breast to large and back again, with an ever
changing waistline, the female body is a construct representing changing male
attitudes to fertility and at his whim on fashion and fantasy. Some of the these
female bodies look strange to us today but this might be the difficulty at the
time accessing a naked body and understanding what actually goes on under that
dress. In the Netherlands we see slight thin legged women often with rather
large feet and sometimes with a small protruding stomach as if in the early
stages of pregnancy. As with Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, the her ‘bump’ is probably a
fashion statement and not a sign of pregnancy.

Adam and Eve is the Biblical excuse to paint the nude, it is the significant
location in European painting of the nude both male and female but principally
female, the ‘ever-recurring subject‘. John Berger said that “men act and women
appearing. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This
determines not only most relations between men and women but the relations of
women to themselves“.

This is the fundamental assumption on which the representation of the nude in
European painting is formed. Patriarchy casts man as the creator, owner and
viewer and women are represented as the object – nature. Men are culture and
women, like children, are seen as closer to nature. Images of the male nude
somehow go against the grain.

In this changing world can the male body take on the kind of representation that
women’s bodies have borne for so long? Within our patriarchal society, the male
body has been kept hidden from our eyes. Women, on the other hand, have been
endlessly explored. The woman’s body is constructed as the object of male
heterosexual fantasy and potentially dangerous. Would men put up with this
over-representation of their bodies?

For the male heterosexual viewer, looking at other men, in the changing room at
the gym say, can arouse the fear that he is looking at another man with the
repressed eyes of desire, and also the fear that he himself may be being looked
at with the same gaze. This can arouse a fear of being objectified, of being
passive, of being less than a man, like a woman: powerless.

From when I was a teenager to my mid thirties there were few images of men in
the media, that, as a gay man, I could relate to, other than in pornography,
which was totally inaccessible when I was a teen and heavily censured in Britain
when I could view this stuff. However this has transformed in Britain in recent
years with the removal of a layer of censorship for parity with EU law and the
all pervading internet.

The most dominant images of the male body in this century have been those which
are commercially produced and which are, in one way or another, trying to sell
you something: films, pop music, body-building equipment or cosmetic products.
This new strategy by advertisers keen to sell directly to men reflects men’s
increasing concern with health and a response to the contemporary crisis in
masculinity. These images have created ideals for manly beauty, strength,
heroism and social, political or financial power. Publications offering the male
body as a site of visual pleasure were, until recently, the domain only of
homosexual men. The driving force in all this change is not ideological or LGBT
and gay liberation, but money. Which means that this sense of freedom, these
‘rights’ can be taken way and simply disappear.