Abstract:
Who should be afraid of the Sinful Snake?
Franz Stuck’s portrait of ‘Die Sünde’
“La femme sera toujours le danger de tous les paradis.”1
There she stands; we set eyes on a voluptuous body bathing in a golden light, her head drew back in the shadow. Only in second sight we see a huge snake encircling her. Who might this be? ‘Die Sünde’, sin, reads the frame, and as a consequence authors give their identification: ‘Eve’. But is it her we are looking at? This interpretation is too easy; in this presentation I search for a deeper meaning. By raising the question: who is Sin? So who shall shiver?
The painting was important for its maker Franz von Stuck (1863-1928); when the Neue Pinakothek of München bought the work, it turned out to be a crucial breakthrough in his career. Moreover he repainted it several times; and under the titles ‘Die Sinnlichkeit’ and ‘Das Laster’ he varied the concept as well. And again scholars generalize the woman with the snake as one and the same, despite the different compositions. This superficial approach is probably the result of the view at Stuck’s art as a hollow spectacle: ‘as long as the content gets the varnish of beauty, it distracts it from judgement’2 states Treffers.
True, Stuck is a master in special effects; the femme fatale in ‘Sin’ plays out her qualities as being the forbidden fruit herself quite well. But especially his act as a sacred “prince of artists” turned out to work against him in recent years. He built a Romanizing villa with his own hands, including a studio with an altar on art. In a provocative deed he elevated the already shocking painting ‘Sin’ as the centrepiece of the shrine. No wonder that, together with Arnold Böcklin (1869-1901) Stuck is the decadent German Symbolist, who painted in an academic style.
But to cross the layer of beauty-varnish, there are four serious fields of study that leads to a profound interpretation. First of all the context of his contemporaries; Max Klinger relates with his cycle of 6 engravings ‘Eva und die Zukunft’ the story of the Fall to Hegel’s theory. The philosopher praises Eve’s curiosity with the result that man was freed from the innocent, read lethargic, state in Paradise. With the knowledge of evil also knowledge of good started to exist, and from now on man could make conscious decisions and therefore become real human beings.
Related to his own oeuvre, in the second place, Stuck painted his own intriguing world that flourished after leaving paradise. His search for an essential answer to the earthly existence could be found in art, or to put in the words of Stuck’s contemporary Bierbaum: ‘Paradise was taken from man and he gave himself art in return’3
As a third focus the Bible tells about the devilish serpent from Paradise that hangs from a tree, offering Eve an apple. From the Middle Ages on this snake is presented female, following most cultures whose bringers of evil are feminine. To indicate her diabolic character, the medieval snake transforms to an anthropomorphic creature. Other sources reveal her name: Lilith. She is supposed to be the first woman on earth that after a fight with Adam was banished from paradise. Not able to cope with his solitude, God thus created Eve from his rib.
It leads to the final question: did Stuck portray Lilith here? Since his nude ‘Sin’ is shown frontally, Stuck definitely breaks with the tradition how to paint an Eve. On top, neither apple nor tree is visible, and the snake is not seducing her. On contrary, they conspire with each other.
Lilith is therefore a closer guess as identification, but her being the fruit of evil, the allegory of sin or the ever dangerous woman that spoils each paradise are as good interpretations as well. In other words: in my opinion Franz von Stuck did more than illustrating the biblical story. He tried to catch the essential of evil here, using all the painterly instruments he had. Now it is up to us to react as an allegory of Adam!
1. Paul Claudel (1868-1955) from: Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher (1929)
2. Albert Treffers, ‘Franz von Stuck: de Nieuwe Heiden’ in: Het Geheim: Duitse schilderkunst van allegorie en symboliek 1870-1900. (Franz von Stuck: the new Pagan’ in: The Secret: German painting of allegory and symbolism 1870-1900) exh.cat. (Groninger Museum) Groningen 1972, 103
3. Otto Julius Bierbaum, Stuck. Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1899.