The moment of the Fall

Abstract

It may be their most public setting: carved from a block of Istrian stone, Adam and Eve flank the sharp, southwest angle of the Doge’s Palace in Venice (fig. 1). The huge corner thrusts these figures aggressively toward the broad quay, called the Molo, where Venice had its grandest entrance to the sea. The city’s nineteenthcentury champion, John Ruskin, nicknamed the three visible angles of the great palace after the stone carvings they displayed. He called this, the building’s principal bend, the “Fig-tree angle,” and he admired how its maker extended and softened the corner by allowing the biblical Tree of Knowledge, pictured as a ficus, to form the farthest outer edge of the palace, with its deeply cut lobed foliage embracing both façades. For Ruskin, such “stones of Venice” embodied the symbiosis of art and faith that he so admired in the era of the Middle Ages. The sculptor, imagined as an anonymous “Gothic” craftsman, had copied nature down to the seeming fibers of those marble branches; but he did so in the service of a pious symbol, here a most venerable one that reaches back into the depths of sacred history. And he allowed his Tree of Knowledge also to reach right into the bustle of everyday life, its entangled story forming the principle turning of urban space, with Adam and Eve, caught red-handed with the fruit but already passing the blame, and Satan’s coils enlarging and embellishing the sculpted angle grotesquely. It was almost certainly the city’s leading sculptor and architect, Filippo Calendario, who carved the palace’s figured capitals in the 1340s, or at least he oversaw their carving—he was responsible for rebuilding the whole