Jack Greenstein's monograph addresses the depiction of the ‘creation of Eve’ in the work of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian sculptors, including Lorenzo Maitani, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano and Jacopo della Quercia. He argues that the medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was incompatible with the new naturalism of Renaissance art and that the image of Eve being created from Adam's rib was ill-suited to the dignity of the human figure or the affective narratives which Renaissance artists and their patrons sought. The creation of Eve therefore posed a new artistic problem in the Renaissance, and one which prompted some exceptional revisions of the visual tradition. Using a methodology based on Barthesian-style codes, rather than Panofskian iconographic interpretation, Greenstein explores how the Renaissance interest in the naturalistic ‘illusion of bodily weight’ (p. 2) changed the iconographic treatment of the creation of Eve and opened it up to ‘a plurality of themes and concepts circulating in Renaissance culture’ (p. 8).

Chapter i provides the initial context, summarising the two-fold creation story in Genesis, and its Jewish and Christian exegesis, especially Augustine's theory of a creation outwith time and a creation within time, and Bede's more common view (adopted by Peter Lombard) of two accounts telling the same story. Greenstein identifies an Augustinian influence on mural cycles, including the lost paintings at San Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome, which showed the simultaneous creation of all things, followed by the specific creation of Adam and Eve. In contrast, Bede's account of creation can be seen in the thirteenth-century mosaics at San Marco, Venice, where God creates Adam out of earth on the sixth day but gives him a soul in a separate scene illustrating Genesis ii.7. Two iconographies for the creation of Eve are described, both derived from the Yawist account. In one, Eve emerges from Adam's side in a single composition, while the other separates the story into multiple scenes (as at San Marco). ‘Emergence iconography’, rather than scenes showing the extraction of Adam's rib became more popular, because it more specifically recalled Adam's statement that he and Eve were ‘one flesh’, a metaphor repeated by Jesus and St Paul.

Chapter ii analyses the creation scenes on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral which are unusual in using both emergence and extraction iconographies. Greenstein relates them to precedents at San Marco and in the Cotton Genesis and argues that significant changes at Orvieto emphasise the coexistence of the Trinity, the creative speech of God and a non-physical formation of Adam. In this context, the formation of the human soul and animation of the body are key issues, as is the Renaissance understanding of ‘form’. Instead of man formed by God's hands out of earth and then animated with a soul, as at San Marco, the Orvieto cycle understood ‘form’ in Aquinas's sense as that which makes a thing itself, and so showed Adam formed by a gesture of command and the soul indicated by God touching Adam's head. Greenstein makes a strong case for the theological astuteness of Lorenzo Maitani, universalis caputmagister of the cathedral, and argues that his creation of Eve is unprecedented in its naturalism (the first Eve to support her own weight) and that he illustrates ‘Adam's prophetic etiological knowledge’ of the sacrament of Christian marriage with similar naturalism (p. 81).

Chapter iii focuses on Pisano's relief for the campanile of Florence Cathedral, where Eve is ‘rendered in accordance with Arisotelian theories about the relation of body and soul’ which were current in theology, medicine and natural science and which influenced naturalism in art (p. 87). Greenstein addresses issues of sexual differentiation, and goes on to consider the question of weight, turning for comparison to the beautiful terracotta panel by an unknown Florentine master now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. The Baptistery doors, discussed in chapter iv, show how Ghiberti found an alternative solution, adding ‘four angels to give a visual justification for [Eve's] weightless state’ (p. 135). That this composition did not become standard is, Greenstein argues, because the role of the angels could be misunderstood. The final chapter explores Jacopo della Quercia's creation of Eve at San Petronio, Bologna. His reliefs (a striking precursor to the Art Deco style) make an ‘ambiguous allusion to Eve's emergence from Adam’, treating this formula as ‘a conventional symbol’ while adapting a new iconography for Eve from the creation of Adam, in which her actions rather than her formation take centre stage. Greenstein concludes that, while all four artists ‘advanced the limits of naturalistic depiction in their time’, Quercia's success in creating a composition which became a new standard was due to his shift in focus ‘from the supernatural force of divine will to the actions of the first woman’. Depicting ‘figures whose movements of the body expressed the movement of their soul’ was what artists did best and Quercia's formula put this at the heart of ‘representing the religious subject’ (p. 179).

Greenstein's long descriptions of the reliefs require careful reading but they provide convincing analysis and he is meticulous in citing artistic precedents and observing iconographic development. He reiterates key points throughout the text which, while repetitive when reading the book cover-to-cover, is helpful given the complexity of some of the matters discussed. The illustrations (many black-and-white with some colour plates) are sufficient and because so much sculpture is involved, the black-and-white images are more useful than would be the case in a book about painting. The framework for Greenstein's argument – that changes in the portrayal of the creation of Eve are ‘best understood as refashionings of a coded iconography’ – is entirely plausible and he takes his theology seriously: the book is a dense mapping of theological texts and ideas onto artistic expressions. This is an original and insightful addition to our understanding of iconography, as sensitive to theology in specific historic contexts as it is to theories of art history and interpretation.