The
execution of these figures is of quite a high order. They have all been
sadly mutilated; but, fortunately, that which has suffered least is a
beautiful figure of Eve. Her head is gone; but the flowing lines of the
lovely torso are unbroken, and the round and graceful limbs are almost
as perfect as when they came from the sculptor's chisel. This figure is
so like the Venus de Medici that it might have been copied from it.
But what is Eve doing in a Dance of Death? Alas! she took the first step
of that dance in Paradise, and the artists of the olden time did not
deprive her of her due precedence. She leads the Dance, but with this
difference from those who follow her:--they, cowering and muffled,
go off the scene with Death; she, upright in her naked innocence and
beauty, brings him on. Poor Eve! she had her punishment and made her
atonement to man for leading him to death, in becoming the source and
the joy and solace of his life; but it was not for the artists of the
Dance of Death to embody this phase of her existence. So essential a
part of the Dance is the temptation of Eve, that the whole subject was
concentrated into the representation of that event by a German engraver,
in this singular manner:--Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of Knowledge,
around which twines the serpent, from whom Eve is receiving the apple;
but the trunk of the tree is formed by the twisted legs and the ribs of
a skeleton, from the head and the outstretched arms of which spring the
branches and the foliage.
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