Rembrandt’s Fall of Man: Appetite and Pleasure in Early Modern Netherlandish Art Criticism

Rembrandt’s etching Fall of Man from 1638 stages a singular version of a familiar theme that disrupts expectations for an idealized depiction of the first humans. Viewers instead encounter a vision of Adam and Eve as atavistic figures, who are riddled with physical imperfections. The print is often regarded as evidence of Rembrandt’s still searching, early studio practice. However, a close reading of the image within the exegetical and creative role of food unspools an elegant, multi-layered discourse on appetitive impulse. The frailties of an undisciplined animal body that contest against the rational mind had long been a chief moralistic concern within Christianity, as it was situated alongside consumption through taste as a mode of knowing. Fall of Man telescopes the complex pleasures and consequences inherent in eating in contexts of the somatic body as an apparatus for human experience and knowledge. Further, it situates the image within an emerging body of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art criticism that reliably gestured to a new, gustatory lexicon as a way to describe the sensory act of looking at imagery, as well as the practice of artistic discernment. The viewer’s appreciation for the execution of a skillfully wrought image was likened to experiencing the gluttonous pleasures of food and drink, analogous to the idea of “eating with the eyes.” Following this ocular theory of reception, viewers were reflexively implicated in Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit as they visually consumed and digested the image themselves.