The Evolution of Eve
3' x 4' - Mixed Media with Acrylic Binder on Canvas
Collage with Michelangelo’s Eve
Whitehead uses the term “structured societies” in his explanations of how we unify contrasts during perception. The recognition of groups of cells, the Milky Way and the bulges of the over-muscled physique of Eve are examples of the endless variety of structured societies. Whitehead calls attention to how we recognize patterns to sort through the complexity of perceptual data. We sort to recognize already harmonized unities that are directed by the viewer’s subjective aim. Our formation of such societies indicates that there is a purpose of pervading nature in which the mere complexity of the given, which produces incompatibilities, is superseded by complexities that produce harmonized unities.
The process by which thought is organized to produce harmonized contrasts can be illustrated in the formal patterns of art with both power and subtlety, as in the head of Eve from the Sistine Chapel incorporated in the detail of my collage, The Evolution of Eve. In Michelangelo’s original, Eve’s upper body turns toward the apple that she reaches to grasp from the hand of an androgynous human figure that transforms from the hips down into a serpent coiled around a tree. We recognize the swell of Eve’s great biceps and forearm and the long, beautiful curve of her neck. These bulging forms and their bounding lines act to our perception as a structured society in which the experiences signified by these forms can gather strength. For instance, the great swelling of the anatomical forms indicates, to acculturated viewers, the heroic, often striving quality that Michelangelo added to the lexicon of Western art. There is a super-intensity in Eve’s directed, curious and fearful glance. Her nostrils flare as if in anger or fear, in harmony with the feelings of her swelling, powerful neck and her thrusting, bulging eyes.
The head of Eve is among Michelangelo’s remarkable expressions of terribilita, in which the artist evokes feelings of determination, intellectual arousal, and animal and sexual energy, and projects a force directed by or toward terror and the possibility of imminent destruction. Finally, we are left with a feeling of humankind’s unquenchable curiosity in spite of fear. Even a detail like the inner folds of Eve’s ear an example of the artist’s accurate grasp of anatomy that enables him to modify accepted norms, is drawn in the image of a simplified serpent, with a gaping jaw to reinforce feelings of fear and danger. This detail also suggests the serpent’s seductive voice in Eve’s ear, which would support the theme found in the human-serpent that offers the apple to Eve in Michelangelo’s original painting. Wilson explains the tendency to react with both fear and fascination toward snakes as an epigenetic rule. He describes how culture draws on that fear and fascination to create metaphors and narratives. I also feel prehensions of the wrathful God of Judeo-Christian tradition. But above all else, it is Michelangelo’s ability to express the heroic within and beyond the fabric of Renaissance thought that impresses me. Kenneth Clark has aptly described the values that are expressed by Michelangelo’s Eve.
"This quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people’s idea of civilization. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognize that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man’s supreme achievement, and since, in the end, civilization depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of man."
To put us in touch with despising material obstacles, and even with defying the blind forces of fate, are among the messages of this painting. While it seems presumptuous to dissect one of Michelangelo’s great accomplishments by using abstractions such as the notion of structured societies, whatever we call them, and however discursive our verbalizations of abstractions must be, our mind relies on such schemes to process meaning. One way to think of the head of Eve is to realize it as an unusually powerful organization of structured societies that allow us access to the intensity and depth of feeling and meaning that are present in Eve’s features.
A remarkable example of a structured society in Eve’s head is found in the design of her eyes. Michelangelo gives Eve’s left eye facing us an arresting quality and a thrust toward the apple by incorporating two distinct adjoining forms. One form is the large white area of the left eye swelling outward, as if in response to bodily energy, fear and desire. The second form is the pupil of the eye narrowing and projecting, like the pyramidal lens enclosure of an early camera, to point directly at the apple. The eye to our right is unusually small compared to the left eye, yet it is equally intense, with a white area like one flat side of another pyramid projecting outward. The contrasts in scale and shape between the two eyes add dynamism and heighten the look of curiosity, fear and intensity in Eve’s face.
The pupil of the left eye is formed into a vertical split, pointed and elliptical. This is not possible in a human eye, but it is characteristic of a cat’s eye and of a snake’s eye. This shape opens a reference frame for the imagination to cross-classify our notions of Eve with the attributes of curiosity and myth that can be associated with cats, and possibly form a link between Eve and human fear of, and fascination with, snakes. Our response to the thoughts and feelings evoked by such details as the bulging, projecting, “human-cat-snake eye” enables us to understand these details as Whitehead’s “atomic bricks,” with which we build our higher experiences. Although these bricks are only remembered traces within the elaborations of consciousness and thought, the fact that we can recognize them gives credence to Whitehead’s claim that the feelings that they evoke are determinate.
Structured societies enable us to deal with complexity. At the same time they are unspecialized. This allows the powerful forms of Eve, with their gestalt of the heroic, her eyes with their expression of curiosity and fear, and other harmonized closures such as her aroused nipples, to overwhelm unwanted details, such as the cracks and stains in the paint, as well as the anatomical improbability of Eve’s oversized arms. Our interest in the heroic gestalt can be maintained as long as unwanted detail can be ignored. Thus structured societies enable intensity of feeling to be mated with survival of feeling.
In describing the superb curve of the left boundary of Eve’s neck, which continues on to divide her hair from her face, we sense power and swelling in the curve that we associate with the heroic limbs. We also feel a component of sensuality, a component of bodily extension, and the same time the contrast of bodily contradiction, or pulling back from extension. There is a sense of advancing and withdrawal that we feel while perusing the whole of Eve’s body. But we also recognize the beauty and grace of the curve as an entity, without attachment to advance, withdrawal, bulging, animal and sexual energy, or to the heroic.
In Whitehead’s system this intrusion does not destroy meaning because, as we shift our focus onto the sheer beauty of the curve, we subject this focus to what he calls “graded envisagement,” allowing us to shape the actual and include what can be felt positively, but which has been excluded from the original gestalt of terribilita. Thus every event, including Michelangelo’s Eve with her over-muscled physique recognized as Whiteheadian structured society, is a limitation imposed on possibility, but one that can accommodate other gestalts.
One could discuss additional structured societies in the design of other features in the head of Eve, like her muscular underarm, shaded to form a vague but potent image. It is a giant nipple and breast? Is it something else or nothing else? There is more to discuss and more that lies beyond our reach. Studying the many contrasts in the portrait of Eve, with their depth and gravity of interest and the miraculous expression of their unity amidst the individuality of their details, encourages me to go along with what a number of experienced observers have written: that Michelangelo remains the greatest artistic genius who ever lived. When I lose myself in the communicative power of Eve I feel impervious to deconstructionist arguments against elevating Michelangelo’s art above Bernini’s, or the sculpture found on Easter Island. One might as well argue that elephant “art,” interesting as it to our contemporary sensibility, exists on the same plane. To argue that there is no “progress” in making or interpreting art from standpoints understanding, history intentionality, the evolution of culture, civilization, values, the expression of power, nuance of feeling, and complexity must end in sophistry.
In my treatment of Eve I have her twisting and rising up, appearing amidst veils and draperies in Greek sculpture and Renaissance art. The emerging cat refers to Eve’s cat’s-eye pupil. The bird links the subject of cats to Eve and her wing. Eve’s wing like appendage refers to the nudes seen flying about Renaissance and Baroque paints, as well as humankinds’ longing to soar. A fishlike head at the lower right corner extends the suggestion of a gamut of animals embedded in a mass from which Eve, with her body metaphors of rising up and out, is shown reaching for the apple. To me this arrangement is a metaphor of “upward” evolution in human complexity and value.
The bright red area suggests, among other things, Eve’s birth out of a female body, a wound, and a female fear of snakes, with a snake image emerging from the wound-vagina. The context of the red area acts to constrain, as well as suggest, possibilities of interpretation. As Johnson tells us, metaphorical systems are like channels in which a subject can move with limited, relative freedom. Meaningful inferences will depend on the metaphorical background against which the phenomena appear. Thus the bulging outlines of Eve’s limbs and the metaphoric elaborations of their prehensions within selected contexts of birth, rising up, fear, curiosity, red wound and emergent snake constitute a vital part of the process by which we build our participation in, and our understanding of, the image.
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