Eve as Glutton: Consumption, Knowledge, and the Sensory Body in Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Fall of Man Images

The nude figure of Eve is depicted with a protruding belly in fifteenth-century Netherlandish Fall of Man imagery, a complement to exegetical claims of her gluttony. Hugo van der Goes’s “Fall of Man” (ca. 1475), exemplary of this type, engages with established concepts of consumption and looking as synesthetic, epistemic experiences. Such images linked tasting to seeing as a conduit for knowing, and shaped a gustatory lexicon later used to describe looking at (consuming) images, notably nudes, in rising Northern theory and criticism of the visual arts.