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Peter Stallybrass VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE LETTERS Text versus Image in Renaissance England and Europe Invisible Writing I used to think that I knew the story of the Fall in Genesis. It went something like this: Adam and Eve eat the forbidden apple, they become suddenly aware of their nakedness, and they try to hide their genitals with fig leaves. But God is not deceived and casts them out of Eden. To prevent their returning, he places Saint Michael with a flaming sword at the gates of Paradise. One of the primary ways in which this story was spread in fifteenth - and sixteenth-century Europe was through the circulation of thousands of woodcuts and engravings in printed books. Few parts of the biblical narrative were more frequently represented—and this part had the great advantage of appearing where most people were likely to read or to see it: the beginning. Given the combination of image and sacred text in illustrated Bibles, it would seem reasonable to assume that the woodcuts were closely related to the passages that they illustrated. The question I address here concerns only a single aspect of a single moment of the story: what were Adam and Eve wearing when they were expelled? A series of elegantly simple woodcuts in a 1483 Speculum, printed in Lyon, condenses the crucial moments of the third chapter of Genesis.1 One depicts Adam and Eve naked in front of the Tree of Knowledge, with Eve offering the apple to Adam. A second shows Saint Michael, his sword raised, as he expels the couple from Paradise. A third shows Adam and Eve, now clothed, working outside Eden, Adam tilling the ground with a hoe while Eve spins, a baby at her breast. The consequences of the Fall are here sharply captured: the gendered division of labor, with Adam digging and Eve spinning; the double labor that Eve now performs (spinning and giving birth to children); and the clothing of Adam and Eve, here in garments that are clearly differentiated by gender: Eve in a long robe, Adam in a smock with his hose rolled down to below his knees. Adam and Eve, then, are naked when they are cast out, and it is only after their expulsion that they are clothed. Visible and Invisible Letters 77 5.1a–b. Both images depict Adam and Eve as naked: (a) detail of engraving by Matthäus Merian, in Biblia (1704); (b) Hans Holbein, Icones Historiarum Veteris Testamenti. (a) Ruth Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College; (b) Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. 5.1c–d. In both cuts, details of the Fall from books published by Koberger in Nuremberg in the 1490s, the fig leaves are tied together in bundles: (c) Lib[er] Cronicarum (1493); (d) Stephan Fridolin, Schatzbehalter (1491). (c) Ruth Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College; (d) Library Company of Philadelphia. 5.1e. Adam and Eve are both clothed. Claude Paradin, Bible (1553). Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, Typ 515.53.674. 78 Peter Stallybrass Half a century earlier, in 1426–27, Masaccio painted his famous fresco of the expulsion in the Brancacci Chapel. The artist depicted Michael flying above Adam and Eve as he expels them. Adam and Eve are naked, and Adam’s genitals are displayed to the viewer. Eve, on the other hand, tries to hide her nakedness, her left hand covering her genitals, her right hand covering her breasts. The painting had an extraordinary afterlife, being imitated by Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and many other artists. And adaptations circulated widely through woodcuts and engravings. In the 1630s, for instance, Matthäus Merian copied Romano’s version of the naked Adam, his head in his hands, his genitals exposed, in an engraving that was used in many Lutheran Bibles. Merian’s plate was itself repeatedly reused (appearing as late as 1704 in a Frankfurt Bible) and in turn provided a model that was copied and adapted (figure 5.1a).2 In Holbein’s design for the expulsion, a vivid connection is made between the naked body and the nakedness of death (figure 5.1b).3 Holbein’s trees, in contrast to Merian’s, are bare, perhaps dead, and there is no sign of the rich animal life (including elephants and camels) that inhabit the new world toward which Merian’s Adam and Eve go. Holbein also includes the skeletal figure of Death, who recalls the further “undressing” that awaits the banished couple: as...

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