Detail of a Fresco by Masaccio (1401 –1428) in the Church of S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. This painting, just like many others depicting the same scene, shows Adam covering his face when chased away from the Garden of Eden. Other paintings show Eve covering her face, or both her and Adam's face. Where they trying to hide from God? Of course not. They were hiding from themselves.
One of the most dramatic moments of the Genesis, perhaps of the whole Bible, is when God searches for Adam and calls him saying, "Adam, where are you?" It is so dramatic because it is obvious that the omniscient God of the Bible knows very well where Adam is. And you can almost feel the surprise of God in seeing his creature hiding from him in a bush.
It is Adam who doesn't know anymore where he is. He has lost his bearing. He has lost his dignity and he is now ashamed of himself. So much that in most pictorial representations we have of the scene, we see Adam (or Eve, or both) covering their faces with their hands. They were ashamed of showing themselves to God for what they were. They didn't have face masks or veils, but if they had had them, they would have shown themselves to God with their faces partly covered.
This scene of the Genesis is part of the human cycle. We tend to see ourselves sometimes as Gods, sometimes as earthworms. It is there, in the Bible: Adam and Eve are the jewel of the creation, but they fail to live up to the expectations of their creator. They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but it was not what they knew that doomed them, it was what they thought they knew. It was lack of humility that led them to true humiliation.
The opposite side of the cycle is the Promethean exaltation. The fire bringer, the Titan God who who represented human striving for scientific knowledge and embedded in a single cycle the success and the failure of the attempt. Here is how the proud Prometheus of the Rockefeller Center, in New York, sees his own doom, humiliated in a scene that brings much more meaning than those who performed the act probably intended. (Image source).
And there we stand: ridiculous as it may be to force a mask onto a lifeless piece of statuary, it is not so bad as doing that to a real human being. A creature created in the image of God as the true jewel of creation. But look at how this poor creature is reduced:
Doesn't this woman remind you of Eve running away from Eden? She is ashamed to raise her glance to the sky, ashamed to look at her fellow human beings, afraid to touch anything and anyone. A sad, humiliated larva, an earthworm, a snake. Yes, the Biblical snake was nothing but ourselves.
I think the best depiction of this contradiction -- man as a jewel and a snake at the same time -- comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the widely known speech "What a piece of work is man".
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty!
in form, in moving, how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
(on Prometheus, see also this post by Miguel Martinez)
