For the past month I’ve been working on an essay that brings together a selection of over three dozen art-historical images of Adam and Eve at Labor—a subject that appeared as early as the fifth century—and provides theological commentary. I wanted to publish it shortly before Labor Day on September 1. Unfortunately, it won’t be finished in time. Whenever I researched a particular image, it opened up further avenues of research, and I’ve realized that I need to spend much more time reading and reflecting on the topic, including consulting more commentaries on Genesis 3 and medieval theologies of work, before writing.
Instead, allow me to simply share a Byzantine ivory panel that amazed me when I encountered it on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago, which I saw in person on my last visit in January—a small little thing, just a few inches wide, and easy to miss in the large glass case in Gallery 300, except that I was specifically looking for it.
It shows Adam hammering iron over an anvil while Eve operates the bellows! Husband and wife co-laboring in a forge—she supplying strong blasts of air to the furnace, he shaping the metal.
This panel struck me because one, I had never seen a medieval image of a female blacksmith before (other than as a personification of Nature, from The Romance of the Rose), and two, the vast majority of images of Adam and Eve at work after the fall show Eve spinning wool or flax and/or breastfeeding while Adam tills the soil, reflecting gendered ideas about the division of labor. Occasionally Eve is shown working the land or harvesting its fruits alongside Adam, as in the Ripoll Bible, a Salerno ivory, a relief carving on the facade of Modena Cathedral, and another ivory panel from this same box—work that men and women in agricultural societies definitely shared then as now. But more often the primordial couple is shown participating in separate spheres of work—the fields versus the home—albeit side by side.
In the Middle Ages, blacksmithing was the domain of men. Sometimes the daughters or wives of male smiths worked alongside them in family-run forges, but they were not permitted to join the guilds.
The Met ivory is a rare egalitarian picture of husband and wife engaged together in a muscular, creative task that contributes to their mutual survival and the betterment of society. Their resourcefulness, ingenuity, hard work, and cooperation are highlighted.
The detached panel is from a luxury box made for an elite Christian client in Constantinople for storing coins, jewelry, or other valuables. A small group of such boxes depicting scenes from the lives of Adam and Eve survives from the tenth and eleventh centuries. It’s possible the box that this smithing panel comes from was a wedding gift, as it espouses the virtue of teamwork in marriage. “Such caskets could have belonged to young couples embarking on a new life together,” writes Ioli Kalavrezou in The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261. “The story of Adam and Eve could have reminded them of the difficulties they would encounter but at the same time spurred them on to an industrious and, it was to be hoped, prosperous existence.”
In the essay “The Origin of the Crafts According to Byzantine Rosette Caskets,” historian Justin Wilson examines Byzantine views about the origin of the primordial crafts (technai) of farming and metallurgy, especially by looking at select scenes from three related ivory boxes: from the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio in the United States, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt in Germany. All three contain a scene of Adam and Eve at the forge.
For the anonymous artists of these boxes, Wilson writes, “blacksmithery symbolizes how human labor reshapes the world.”
The scene on the Darmstadt casket features a third figure between the couple: Plutus, the Greek god of wealth and abundance, holding a moneybag. In his 1899 study of the Adam and Eve chests, the classical archaeologist Hans Graeven proposed that Plutus signifies the valuable contents presumably kept inside the chest; art historian Josef Strzygowski agreed, suggesting that the god was meant to be read in relation not to Adam and Eve but to the chest’s lock (now missing), under which he was placed.
Wilson adds that Plutus, traditionally associated with good fortune, signals the prosperity of postlapsarian life—that although we lost Eden and must sweat and toil for our bread, humanity can still thrive. In the words of the late pastor Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor, “Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and ‘unfold’ creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development,” and there’s blessedness in that.
Art & Theology 