Beschreibung:

A German sculpted boxwood model of Eve in the manner of Tilman Riemenschneider first half 16th century, portrayed standing, nude and looking straight ahead, with long hair descending down both shoulders and down her back to her buttocks, her weight on her left leg, an apple held out in her right hand, her left hand holding a fig leaf to her pudenda; later mounted on an octagonal section stained wood base, the figure 19cm high, overall height 23.5cm Close comparisons can be drawn with Riemenschneider's lifesized sandstone figure of Eve, executed for the south portal of the Marienkapelle at Würzburg in around 1492. That work (complimenting a figure of Adam to the other side of the doorway) has a stance and the hands positioned in a clearly related manner, but this particular pose was not uncommon in portrayals of the period, (compare with Daniel Mauch's boxwood model of Venus with an Apple, held at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland) More striking is the similarity of the treatment of the hair. In both the Marienkapelle stone Eve, and the boxwood example offered here it is not only the way in which the hair falls from a central parting over both shoulders and trails loosely down the backs of the figures, but also the very specific manner in which the hair is carved, as trailing and wavy tresses. This style of portraying hair can also be seen in Riemenschneider's Ascension of Mary Magdalene from the Magdalena Altarpiece in Münnerstadt, executed at about the same time as the Marienkapelle Adam and Eve