The Dreaming Eve of Autun
Reading Iris Murdoch's 1964 novel The Italian Girl recently, I was interested to find a reference to a Burgundian work of art. In the book, the sculptor Otto, unhappily married to Isabel, blurts out to his brother Edmund: "The spiritual disadvantages of marriage are crippling. I could have been a good man if I hadn't married. Sometimes I think women really are the source of evil. They are such dreamers. Sin is a sort of unconsciousness, a not-knowing. Women are like that, like the bottle. Remember that dreaming Eve at Autun, that dreaming, swimming, dazed Eve of Gislebertus?" The dreaming Eve of Autun then becomes something of a reference point in the story, which I will not spoil for anyone who hasn't yet read it! The dreaming, swimming, dazed Eve, as Dame Iris put it so well, was originally part of the west entrance of Autun Cathedral, whose tympanum is regarded, along with that of the basilica of Vézelay, as on...