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 one of the high points of Burgundian mediaeval sculpture. In the mid-18th century, however, people were evidently not quite as respectful of mediaeval artistic heritage as we might be nowadays, and the two blocks of stone that make up the Temptation of Eve, along with others representing Adam on the other side of the cathedral doorway, were removed to make way for "improvements," and disappeared from view. The Eve carvings were discovered over a century later as part of the walls of a house in Autun, recognised for what they were, and put into the Musée Rolin next to the cathedral, where they remain today.




    The whole sculptured portal bears the inscription Gislebertus hoc fecit, and so presumably the Eve was also his work, dating from about 1130. Raymond Oursel in his Bourgogne Romane, characterises the Temptation of Eve thus: "prouesse technique et oeuvre étrange, unique dans toute la statuaire romane, par la sensualité lascive du corps nu, la pose féline, l'inquiétante volupté qui en émane et condense sur cet instant décisif tout le drame de la tentation et de la chute."





    "Dreaming, swimming, dazed": sin as "a sort of unconsciousness."





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