Rutsinskaya I.I. Biblical Plot of the Fall in European Painting of the IIIth-XIIIth Centuries: Methods of Depicting the «Forbidden Fruit»

Abstract: In the early Christian and medieval art of Europe the Old Testament's story of the Fall was one of the most famous. Its iconography developed already in the III-IVth centuries. The composition was fixed and excluded any inessential elements. Every small detail was important and allowed an adequate interpretation and visualization of the biblical text. That being said, the absence of a common view when identifying and depicting such important parts of the plot as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and its «forbidden fruit» seems odd. The author of the article analyzes basic depiction methods of the «forbidden fruit» that were widely used in European painting of the III-XIIIth centuries. The classification proposed by the author includes three types of images that can be characterized in the following way: 1) absence of a visual fixation on fruit (the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is either portrayed without any fruit or the fruit is indistinguishable and unidentifiable); 2) attempt to depict something abstract, a fruit that does not exist or is unknown to mankind (that is to say – an attempt to find a visual equivalent of the biblical definition of fruit); 3) identification of the "forbidden fruit" with the fruit that exists in reality. The author supports her iconographic analysis of a wide range of paintings by appealing to apocryphal texts, theological treatises, spoken and written legends. Despite the fact that iconography of the Fall had been already developed in the early Christian period, the common method of depicting the 'forbidden fruit' was not developed throughout the first centuries of European art. Following the text of Genesis, Bible interpretations and commentaries and oral traditions, the art of that time offered the answers not only to the questions about the image or the name of the «forbidden fruit» but also about its meaning and symbolism. They can be interpreted as a reflection of the socio-cultural context of the era, belief systems and values of a particular region of Western Europe in a particular historical period.

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