ABSTRACT
The glorification of the naked male body in ancient pagan art is matched by the denigration of the female body in much of Christian art. Eve's sin—not Eve herself—is the source for the female nude in Western painting. Her eating of the apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, the meal shared with Adam that universalized the sin, produces the necessity of clothing to hide the shame that both, having sinned, suddenly experience. Their sense of shame is not the product of sensitivity to nakedness as such. Baldung's painting is organized around the sight of Eve's body. The background is black; the tree and Adam's body are both mostly brown. Indeed, Baldung fashions "an erotic art that itself arouses the desires that reflect a viewer's kinship with Adam. And Baldung punishes those desires through the viewer's experience of revulsion in encountering himself in the habit of the corpse.".
