The Garden of Eden

‘In the Beginning, All the World Was America’, John Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Through the course of centuries, there have been many interpretations of the English philosopher’s evocative fantasy of the primordial state of nature. Is he celebrating freedom before property or is there a settler mentality latent in his account?

Some 150 years after Locke, Thomas Cole was only 27 years old when he painted his Garden of Eden (1828). As one of the forefathers of the Hudson River School, he celebrated the majesty of the American landscape. In Cole’s time, the project of westward expansion was in full force. Indeed, five years later Cole undertook a Grand Tour of Europe after which he painted a suite of five canvases entitled The Course of Empires, which moves from The Savage State to The Arcadian or Pastoral State, then from The Consummation of Empire to Destruction and finally to Desolation. The parallel between the fallen Roman Empire and the burgeoning American one is clear.

All of the ‘New World’ appears as a pure, unspoilt wilderness ready to be populated by a man and a woman. Cole depicts trees that are equally as lofty as the mountains, and a surging waterfall can be seen in the centre. In the foreground are colourful flora; in the babbling brook appear precious stones described in Genesis 2:12–13: gold, bdellium, and onyx stone.

The overt Romanticism of Cole’s painting might seem a bit clichéd today, anticipating the dreamscapes of an American middle-class, living room aesthetic. On the one hand, the painting might represent the simple innocence of our first parents overwhelmed by the sublime grandeur of nature. On the other hand, a contrapuntal reading could take it as an implicit tract for (or critique of) Western expansion. What ideology underlies Cole’s aesthetic? There is no doubt that when Cole maps the Biblical Eden onto America, he imbues the new nation with a sense of destiny and providence.

Perhaps if migration was a return to humankind’s origins, America can redeem us from the expulsion from paradise. Or we might wonder whether Cole’s more subtle point is that the Indigenous peoples were the first Adams and Eves of the Americas. Expelled by the incursion of European immigrants, they become victims of yet another phase in humanity’s fallen history.

Is there any painter who delights in such mind-boggling and eye-popping details as Hieronymus Bosch?

The central panel in The Garden of Earthly Delights is an exercise in proliferating multiplicity: animal, vegetal, mineral. Reading the triptych from left to right, Bosch depicts the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, and finally Hell. Thus he charts the creation of two humans by one God to the procreation of many humans, and the descent into a cacophonic ‘subhuman’ multitude. What happens when one becomes two and two becomes many, and many becomes a hot, hellish mess?

In the luxuriantly detailed tour-de-force that is the central panel, Bosch gives us an encyclopaedia of creaturely desire.

Here, we see an interpenetration of living things great and small: humans appear to be animals and animals appear to be human. All permutations of copulation seem possible. Bodies are torquing, grabbing, entangled; all of creation huddled together and hankering after each other.

Genesis 2:16–17 present the primordial prohibition for the human race: ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’. Very clearly, Bosch has gone far beyond the plain text of scripture. The humans in his garden are gluttonous, ingesting humongous strawberries, raspberries, and cherries, and even each other—wildly exceeding the simple biblical regulation.

Yet, perhaps this frenzy of consumption recognizes a deeper truth of the biblical story. The oldest surviving observation about the painting comes from Fray José Sigüenza, who called it the ‘Strawberry Plant’ in 1605 and said it was about ‘the vanity and glory and transient state of strawberries’. Bosch shows us it is just as much about the vanity, glory, and transience of sinful humans.

References

Belting, Hans. 2005. Garden of Earthly Delights  (Munich: Prestel)

Koerner, Joseph Leo. 2016. Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

The history of the Persian carpet might be as old as the Bible. Already in the Achaemenid Empire (sixth–fourth centuries BCE), highly skilled weavers were producing rugs of the highest quality. Recent scholarship dates the Hebrew Bible canon to the Second Temple post-exilic period (from 516 BCE). Indeed, it is now believed by many scholars that it was during the age of Persian dominance that Judaism was organized into a distinct, unified religion.

Paradise in Hebrew is pardes and in the Persian Old Avestan language pairidaēza- means ‘a wall enclosing a garden or orchard’. When the writers of Genesis were imagining the original home of our first parents, might they have been remembering the parks where Persian nobles delighted in hunting wild game or the wilted, overgrown ruins of their former masters?

Garden and geometric designs are fundamental to Persian carpets. This splendid example from the Victoria & Albert Museum takes the traditional chahar-bagh structure (from the Persian chahar, meaning four, and bagh, meaning garden). Persian garden makers used the fourfold matrix long before their conversion to Islam, and when Muslim architects came along, they transposed the chahar-bagh to the Quranic four rivers of Eden.

It is not only the design of Persian carpets that mimics real gardens. So do their materials. The coloured dyes of these opulent works were made from vegetal ingredients: pomegranate peels, eucalyptus leaves, indigo, black curd, turmeric, herbs, acorn shells, and alum. Since so much of the Middle East is a desert, to unfurl a carpet or construct a garden in the arid land was to gesture to an unattainable transcendental locus, a visible yearning for something invisible.

If gardens are fixed green monuments, then scriptures and carpets are portable gardens, nomadic objects that offer refuge from inhospitable neighbours and harsh surroundings.

References

Burns, James D. 2010. Visions of Nature: The Antique Weavings of Persia (New York: Umbrage Editions)

Stone, Peter F. 2013. Oriental Rugs: An Illustrated Lexicon of Motifs, Materials, and Origins (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing)