The Northern Renaissance: The Most Radical Work of the Era

For the depiction of female sexuality, i.e. the female genital organ, a transparent veil is always necessary, which precisely marks particularly sensitive places in the text, which establishes the (male) view as voyeuristic, and the entire scene as a decisive factor of the newly found, exalted scopophilia that insists on the fetishistic segmentation of the scene: balding as if calling the viewer to come closer, to focus on the picture, which is why he is drawn into the dialectic of what can and cannot be seen. In this way, the female 'part' of the picture belongs to the imaginary order dominated by metonymy, and the male to the symbolic one, which is organized around a metaphor, more precisely the phallus as a metaphor. While metonymy refuses deployment, 'anchored' in a presence that is unspeakable (and thus permanently tied to the traumatic potential of the Real), metaphor rests on the increased mobility of the signifier (who can transfer or translate signs from one scene to another), where interpretation and desire.

Na The fall of humanity from 1511, the bodies of Adam and Eve are popular: coitus happens a lot. On To Adam and Eve from 1531, the bodies are still slightly separated, so there is no direct genital contact. What does Baldung use to fill that 'gap', that 'hole' in the realistic space, which stands instead of a concrete thing, that is, a real sexual content? This 'vacuum' - in the economy of signs there is no 'empty' place - is filled and built upon by a metaphor that simultaneously covers the gaping absence and masks that penetration takes place by other means. The gap between the bodies, which have already been transformed into initial sexual objects, Baldung 'compensates' by inserting into the 'gap' - Adam's left hand, the mentioned author's 'leaf' which prevents from seeing what, in this topography and arrangement of figures, however (yet) it does not happen, which is the painter's chosen moment for the elaboration of an innovative, perverse visual logic according to which the symbol itself can become much more obscene than it is a pornographic denotation. Metaphor, moreover, is what defines obscenity as such, that is, it moves the controversial sexual substance off-stage (ob-scene), thus confirming the decadent, mannerist essence of the erotic spectacle.

The phallus is the basis of metaphorical language. Adam holds Eve's breast with his right hand, and his thumb almost touches her nipple, but the main erotic event, or experience, or document takes place on the opposite side, in a forcibly 'inserted' element, in the left hand that stands on the back of Adam's crotch, exactly where would 'should' have a penis if they possessed an uncensored insight, perhaps through an anamorphic rotation rather than a frontal setting: Baldung's phallic insert. The iconic hand, whose shape resembles a penis and whose function is to block the view in the center of the picture, more than indicatively touches another object intended for visual arrest, that is, it holds a transparent veil as a functional drapery, indicating that here Adam has put everything under his control. It is with that hand on Eve's thigh that Adam controls her body, like a painter who shows the model what pose he should take, in order to fully specify the author's mise-en-scène, in the sense of necessary continuity and semantic punctuation. Thus, the phallic sign - as a fetishistic projection - holds the entire composition together, although the phallus itself is censoriously covered, and the vaginal metonymy, regardless of the placed veil, is concretely present. Adam's gaze, which is directed beyond the painting, into the non-diegetic space that belongs to the viewer, still remains ambiguous, but its interpellation power is primarily emitted if we understand Adam not as a participant in an individual erotic relationship, but as - a counterpoint - the painter's double (or counterpart) who he shapes both his craft and his philosophy by arranging bodies and markers of gender difference in order to produce the strongest impact of meaning.

Adam and Eve from 1531, especially due to the emphasis on the metapoetic dimension, can be taken as Baldung's finely graded final word in the explication of the theme of the First Parents. However, no matter how sophisticatedly this painting tries to round off some of the painter's most important semantic flows, no matter how much it tries to bring the arc of development of the author's poetics to a satisfactory synthesis, there is one work in the artist's oeuvre, an earlier staging of the narrative about Adam and Eve, which with its own and stylistic and anthropological separateness, not to mention worldview implications, refuses to fit into Baldung's dark and ironic perspective, which anyway constantly insists on the thanatological overcoming of Eros.

Actually, a woodcut The fall of humanity (1519) is the most radical and controversial work of the entire (Northern) Renaissance. The nature of that radicalism is twofold. On the first level, intentionally 'baring' (sic!) the scene, reducing - or essentializing - the scenography, concentrating as much as possible on the two protagonists who take the already typical Baldung pose where Adam is behind Eve, the author moves the primal scene almost completely out of the allegorical view. The entire interpretive tradition that tried to consolingly or recuperatively interpret the original play by, for example, taking Eve as the embodiment of the senses, and Adam as the representative of reason in the fundamental scenario of Creation and Fall, in this work becomes out of place, clearly insufficient. 'Reducing' the already lavish iconography to the basic work of sharp and unrelenting draws, the The fall of humanity Baldung some of the philosophical distinctions - such as, for example, the one according to which Eve, since her rational component cannot be taken away, is on a lower level of reason (scientist), and Adam on the higher (wisdom) - simultaneously deconstructs and completely negates, offering a visceral record as the most adequate means of describing what was just before and immediately after with the First Couple. And the snake - which could connotatively operate in a wide range from an agent of guilt to an ominous promise of pleasure to a substitute for the male genital organ (some of these variants were, of course, used by Baldung) - was rejected in this representation, in an effort to paint of human origin is deprived of the subsequent melodramatic and discursive 'glamour'. On The fall of humanity only the tree of knowledge remains, but the old trunk and branch do not look as if Eve has just removed the two apples she is holding in her hands. The symbolic activity of the tree is, therefore, minimal, and related to perhaps the most impressive trompe-d'oeil throughout Baldung's catalog: if in the Adam and Eve of 1531, Adam's left hand indexed the missing penis, then earlier, in the Fall of Mankind, Eve's left hand, in the half-darkness of the accentuated shading, with fingers barely holding an apple, looks like a swollen vaginal hole 'inscribed' on the gnarled tree.

A disturbing dimension The fall of humanity it is found, among other things, in the fact that the coitus of the First Parents is left without a clear allegorical foothold, which always mitigates (since understanding fits them into some wider explanatory scheme) the ontological and existential consequences suffered. Does this mean that only here, in fact, did Baldung step out into the terrible clearing of human tubism, that only in this instance did he outline what post-lapsarian reality is and how it relates to the male and female bodies in their irreducible difference? The fall of humanity is a picture that is not intended for contemplation, but is brutally imposed by exposition (just as the protagonist does in it). It is a picture in which there is no sensuality, no elegance, from which memory and realization seem to have been banished - even though it all happened practically a short time ago - that there once was a Paradise, that it was the starting location of this narrative that will never return. to the original environment and abundance. One can only fantasize about Paradise, but... The fall of humanity a new, irreversible, depressing reality of gender relations, body politics, irrefutability of sexual inscription has already set in. In this different visual mapping of Baldung, who are this Adam and this Eve, really? They do not resemble the other painter's Adam and Eve variations, faces that are difficult to recognize in these roles: it is as if Baldung himself, who was no stranger to dark conclusions and complete anthropological pessimism, without an allegorical 'safety net' had to state a certain alienation (first of all, an acute lack of beauty) in these unheimlich figures, right on the border of psychosis that becomes a constitutive part of the human subject.