VOLUME 12 ISSUE 1

The International Journal of

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Arts Theory and History

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Navel Gazing
On Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504)

VAUGHAN HART

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 Navel Gazing:
On Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504)
Vaughan Hart, University of Bath, UK

Abstract: This article re-examines one of the most famous images of the Renaissance, that of “Adam and Eve” as
engraved in 1504 by “Albrecht Dürer.” The article discusses the influence on Dürer of the theories of “human
proportion” outlined by the Roman architectural writer “Vitruvius.” These theories are seen as the context for the
hitherto unexplained presence on Adam and Eve of “navels.” The article also examines the historical dilemma of how to
represent the perfect human form of the biblical pair whilst reflecting the story of their birth.

Keywords: Albrecht Dürer, Vitruvius, Adam and Eve, Navels, Human Proportion

Introduction

H ave you ever wondered why the motherless Adam is often depicted with a navel?
Whether or not Adam had a navel is not a new question, of course, but one that has
caused some debate, especially today amongst creationists who, unsurprisingly, dispute
the idea (Gardner 2001; Sims 2003). Adam’s navel is an anomaly, given its biological function
and the story of his birth, and its presence or otherwise has frequently been an issue for those

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seeking to square biblical miracles with natural laws. A small detail has thus provoked a much
larger debate. This article examines Adam’s navel as prominently represented in one of the most
famous images produced during the Renaissance, that of Adam and Eve at the time of their Fall
engraved by the German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528, Figure 1). Dürer’s influential
engraving has been much studied over the years, not least by William Conway and Erwin
Panofsky who, despite examining the image’s composition and symbolic program, neglect to
discuss the significance of the birth scar (Conway 1889; Panofsky 1945).

“Which Has Its Centre in the Navel”: Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504)
The Bible leaves the reader in no doubt as to the divine source of human form, and that it was
this similitude that helped guarantee mankind’s supremacy over other living creatures. The book
of Genesis opens with the first chapter recording that God commanded:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,
and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his
own image. (Genesis 2016, I, 26–27, n.p.)

Eve was then created from a bone taken from Adam’s side. Conway has pointed out that Dürer,
as a devout Christian, “of course, accepted the Genesis legend as literal truth” (Conway 1889,
166). What he does not point out, however, is that the presence of the navel on both figures in
Dürer’s image is at odds with this acceptance, or moreover that its depiction was apparently also
at odds with the deliberately meaningful nature of all the other details in the engraving. Or was
it? Of the very many remarkable images engraved by Dürer, the one of Adam and Eve produced
in 1504 has always stood out above the rest. In his depiction of the naked couple at the
momentous moment of their Fall from grace, Dürer manages to combine beauty with tragedy,
and to capture the human vulnerability at the heart of their story. The influence of the image can

The International Journal of Arts Theory and History

Volume 12, Issue 1, 2016, www.artsandsociety.com
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ARTS THEORY AND HISTORY

be seen in all subsequent depictions of the subject, almost immediately in a painting by Dürer
himself (1507) and then notably in ones by Raphael (c.1509), Michelangelo (1508–12), Lucas
Cranach (1526) and later still in an engraving by Theodor De Bry (1590). Michelangelo’s
reclining Adam in the Sistine chapel in Rome is no doubt the best known of these, in which the
bellybutton is again clearly visible. Dürer was not, however, the first to represent Adam and Eve
with navels. Perhaps the most striking early image is Massachio’s of 1426 in the church of Santa
Maria del Carmine in Florence. But Massachio offered Dürer a visual precedent, rather than a
theological justification, for an anatomical detail clearly not in accord with the biblical account
he sought to represent, and to represent moreover through the careful consideration of the
symbolic association of every element.

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Figure 1: Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, engraving, 1504

Source: British Museum, London: The Trustees of the British Museum

In Dürer’s image, Adam and Eve both stand with their weight placed on one leg, whilst the
other is slightly bent, giving the engraving a casual appearance that belies the formality of its
symbolic composition. The image was famously interpreted by Panofsky, and his understanding
has become accepted in catalogue entries for the engraving, such as that of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York (Panofsky 1945). Panofsky points out that the branch that Adam
holds is of the mountain ash, the Tree of Life, whilst the fig branch apparently held by Eve, and
conveniently covering her “private parts,” is from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Four of the
animals in the picture are understood to have come together to represent the medieval concept of
the four temperaments: the cat is identified with choleric cruelty, the ox phlegmatic sluggishness,
the rabbit sanguine sensuality, and the elk melancholic gloom. Before the Fall, these humors

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were held in check, controlled by the innocence of man; once Adam and Eve ate from the apple
of knowledge, all four were activated, and all innocence was lost.
Not surprisingly given Dürer’s evident consideration of every aspect of the engraving, the
proportions of Adam and Eve are carefully worked out too. This is clear from the reverse of one
of the preparation drawings (Conway 1889). Dürer became increasingly drawn to the concept
that underlying the many types of human body lay a system of proportion and measurement that
gave proof to divine intention. He eventually published several well-known books codifying his
theories: these were the Underweysung der Messung (Manual of Measurement) published in
1525, and the Vier Bücher von Menschlichen Proportion (Four Books of Human Proportion)
published, just after his death, in 1528. In a celebrated draft dedication (to Willibald Pirckheimer)
and introduction to the Vier Bücher written in 1523 (now held in the Department of Manuscripts
at the British Library, London), Dürer revealed how his interest in human measurement had been
awakened by the Venetian artist Jacopo de’ Barbari. He had first met de’ Barbari whilst in
Venice in 1495, and then met up with him again, this time in Nüremberg, in 1500. He also
recorded that his study of human proportion was based on one ancient source in particular,
namely the treatise by the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius (who had come to the artist’s
attention in 1500; Panofsky 1945):

I found no one who has written about a system of human proportion, except Jacobus, a
native of Venice and a lovely painter. He showed me how to construct man and woman

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based on measurements. When he told of this, I would rather have come into possession
of his knowledge than of a kingdom…But Jacobus I noticed did not wish to give me a
clear explanation; so I went ahead on my own and read Vitruvius, who describes the
proportions of the human body to some extent. (Conway 1889, 165)

Vitruvius had made his brief statement on the proportions of the human body in the third book of
his De Architectura. Without applying the symmetry and proportion apparent in “a well-
proportioned man,” he wrote, there can be no guiding principles or method “rationem” in the
design of a temple (Vitruvius 2009, 3.1.1). A number of simple numerical relationships between
parts of the human body follow by way of example, such as for the height of the body: this is said
to be equivalent to either the height of eight heads, or of ten faces from chin to hairline (3.1.2).
The first book of Dürer’s Vier Bücher, mainly composed by 1512/13 and completed by 1523,
illustrated five variously constructed types of both male and female figures, with all the parts of
the body similarly expressed in fractions of the total height. Dürer recorded that he based these
constructions on Vitruvius and empirical observations of between two and three hundred
individuals. The second book included eight further types, this time broken down not into
fractions but using a system derived from Leon Battista Alberti possibly via Francesco di
Giorgio’s De Harmonia Mundi Totius of 1525 (Panofsky 1945). Again hardly surprisingly,
throughout Dürer’s search for the underlying principles of human proportion, the navel featured
in every full-length image of the body.
Vitruvius’s numerical dissection of the male body informed its many depictions by Dürer
after 1500, of which Adam and Eve might be considered the most refined (Wolf 1943; Doorly
2004). Take for example his engraving Nemesis (more generally called The Large Fortune, of
around 1501/02; Figure 2). Panofsky has argued that, in this case, her principal measurements
agree exactly with those prescribed by the Roman writer:

The foot, from the heel to the tip of the conspicuously extended big toe, is one-seventh
of her total height (from the heel to the top of the head); the length [i.e., height] of the
head, from the top of the chin, is one-eighth; the length [i.e., height] of the face, from
the chin to the jewel in the diadem, is one-tenth; and the “cubit,” from the finger-tips (if
the fingers were extended) to the well-marked bone of the elbow, one-fourth. (Panofsky
1945, 81–82)

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In the same Vitruvian vein, in the Adam and Eve engraving the height of Eve measured from her
heal to the top of her head is equivalent to ten faces (chin to hairline). Panofsky points out that
Dürer followed Vitruvius in nearly all of his drawings of male figures, such as warriors, sols and
Apollos, which preceded Adam and Eve (Panofsky 1945).

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Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer, Nemesis or The Large Fortune, engraving, c.1501/02
Source: British Museum, London: The Trustees of the British Museum

In the prominence given by Dürer to Adam’s apparently unwarranted navel, here again he
can be seen to have taken his cue from the ancient authority offered by Vitruvius. As Dürer was
well-aware, the navel had been given a central role, quite literally, by the Roman author as part
of his description of the body’s geometrical properties: for “the central point of the human body
is naturally the navel. So that if a man were laid out on his back with his hands and feet spread
out and compasses are set at his navel as the centre and a circle described from that point, the
circumference would intersect with all his fingers and toes” (Vitruvius 2009, 3.1.3). Dürer would
also have been well-aware that Vitruvius was unique amongst antique authors in recording these
properties. In around 1507 he was to summarize Vitruvius’s passage in notes accompanying a
drawing of a man inscribed within a circle and another of the figure within a square (Figure 3).
Here he writes:

Vitruvius, the ancient architect whom the Romans employed upon great buildings, says
that whosoever desires to build should study the perfection of the human figure, for in it
are discovered the most secret mysteries of proportion. So, before I say anything about
Architecture, I will state how a well-formed man should be made, and then about a
woman, a child and a horse…he says that if one lays a man down on the ground, with
his hands and feet extended, the circumference of a circle, which has its centre in the
navel, will pass through the hands and feet. Thus he attempts to find, out of the human
limbs, a circular construction. (Conway 1889, 165–66)

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Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, Vitruvian Man
Source: The British Library, London: British Library Board

The Roman author’s passage is of course very well known through this celebrated image of
the so-called Vitruvian man (Sgarbi 1993; Gorman 2002). It was first drawn by Di Georgio (in
his unpublished Trattato di Architettura of around 1482, this version held in the Biblioteca
Reale, Turin), where the penis is taken to be the centre of the circle and square, and then
famously by Leonardo da Vinci (c.1490, held in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), where the
navel of the spread-eagled man is more “correctly” at the centre of the enclosing circle (whilst his
penis is here again at the centre of the square). Not surprisingly, perhaps, Vitruvius’s
unillustrated passage was destined to become one of the most popular candidates for illustration
in the printed editions of his work, at first by Fra Giocondo in 1511 and then by Cesare Cesariano
in 1521 (Figure 4). And in the second book of Dürer’s Vier Bücher, a number of figures stretch
to touch a circle that is centred, in classic Vitruvian style, on the navel (Figure 5). As far as these
Renaissance commentators were concerned, the ideal geometric properties of man as understood
by the ancients only appeared to confirm the biblical account that God had made man “in his own
image.” The description by Vitruvius of the navel’s centrality in this underlying human geometry
and, or so he implies, of temple design also gave rise in the Renaissance to a number of
imaginative architectural interpretations. Where Vitruvius had been allusive, these later
applications were quite literal. Perhaps the most striking was again by Di Giorgio in his
unpublished Trattato now held in Turin. This illustrated a city whose fortifications followed the
outline of a man; and the principal piazza, in the form of a circle, was located at his centre, in the
position of the navel (Lowic 1983). Di Giorgio justified his analogy of the central piazza with the
navel by reason of similitude “cagione della similitudine,” because the navel is the site of
nutrition and geometric perfection (De Giorgio 1967, ii, 363).

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Figure 4: Vitruvian Man, from Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio
Pollione de Architectura Libri Dece. Como: G. da Ponte, 1521
Source: The British Library, London: British Library Board

Alongside Adam’s navel, the umbilicus was also an important, if less controversial, attribute
of the classical examples of ideal male beauty known to Dürer. The statue of the Hellenistic
Apollo Belvedere had a prominent one, of significance since the statue is often cited as the main
influence on Dürer’s representation of Adam’s posture and form (Grafton, Most and Settis 2010).
The Apollo was excavated in Italy in the late fifteenth century, and Dürer would most likely have
seen images or copies, such as the statue by Antico now held in the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, or
the engraving by Nicoletto da Modena of c.1500 (around the same time as Adam and Eve), in the
course of drawing his own interpretations of the god (drawings held in the collections of the
British Museum). Moreover, Christ was also commonly represented with a navel (reasonably
enough given his natural birth). He was equally celebrated in the Renaissance as a perfect
example of the male form, not least by Dürer himself in woodcuts such as the Flagellation of
Christ of 1496–97 (Tavernor 2002). This idealization was helped by Vitruvian man taking on
Christ-like qualities when illustrated stretching to touch a square, as if on a cross. Adam’s body
in Dürer’s engraving thus conformed to these Pagan and Christian images, current at the time, of
the ideal male form.
Dürer plainly understood the navel to lie at the very centre of what he terms the “most secret
mysteries of proportion.” His theory of human proportion had a strong religious basis, writing in
his draft dedication to Pirckheimer in the Vier Bücher that: “the Creator fashioned men once and
for all as they must be, and I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum
of all men” (Conway 1889, 166). It was this ideal of human beauty and natural order that lay at
the heart of the divine plan that he sought to visualise in Adam and Eve. Clearly therefore,
despite the navel’s biological role, its presence here was not a contradiction to this view. Perfect
human form suggested, in fact demanded, the navel’s presence, in marking the centre of one of
the body’s two geometric truths as understood by the ancients. Adam’s bellybutton takes on an
essential symbolic role in Dürer’s image, just like his cat and rabbit. Although the depiction of
the birth scar is a tiny detail, its presence has important theological and aesthetic consequences.

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Figure 5: Vitruvian Man, from Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher von Menschlichen Proportion.
Nüremberg: Hieronymus Formschneyder, 1528, Book Two, fols 65v–66r
Source: Cambridge University Library: Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University

“An Umbilicality Even with God Himself”: A Debate Is Born

Due to the reproducible nature of the engraved image and the development of the printed book,
Albrecht Dürer’s work quickly enjoyed widespread influence and he even came to be ranked
alongside his principal source, Vitruvius, as an expert on human proportion. In England for
example, John Dee’s “Mathematical Preface” to Euclid of 1570 recommended its readers to,
“Looke in Albertus Durerus, De Symmetria humani Corporis” (Dee 1570, ciiij). And a version of
the Adam and Eve engraving was used to illustrate perfect human proportions in the English
translation by Richard Haydocke of Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura,
Scoltura, et Architettura of 1598 (Hart and Hicks 1998).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the depiction of Adam’s navel in Renaissance images has not gone
unnoticed by philosophers and art theorists over the years. For example the Norwich doctor and
natural philosopher Sir Thomas Browne discussed the issue in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica
(1646). Browne examined what he regarded as “vulgar errors” and received half-truths current in
his day, and his book represented an early example of the kind of nascent rationalism that would
soon be supported by the Royal Society from 1660. In the fifth book of the fifth chapter, entitled
Of the picture of Adam and Eve with Navels, Browne rehearsed the argument that artists were in
error since to depict Adam and Eve with navels was, “to confound…the first Acts of God, unto
the second of Nature” (Browne 1672, 278). Browne singled out the artworks of Raphael and
Michelangelo, observing that pictures featuring Adam and Eve with navels were “observable not
only in ordinary and stained peeces, but in the Authentick draughts of Urbin, Angelo and others”
(Browne 1672, 277). He went on to say that to admit that the biblical pair did indeed possess
navels would be to suggest that, “in the first and most accomplished piece, the Creator affected
superfluities, or ordained parts without use or office.” Such an admission offended Browne’s
urge to find rational explanations for biblical phenomena. So in order to counter this, he went to
some trouble to explain the biological function of the navel, commenting that,

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Now the Navel being a part, not precedent, but subsequent unto generation, nativity or
parturition, it cannot be well imagined at the Creation or extraordinary formation of
Adam, who immediately issued from the Artifice of God; nor also that of Eve, who was
not solemnly begotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam.
(Browne 1672, 277)

That said, Browne concluded by considering the possibility that Adam did indeed have a kind of
metaphorical navel, because he was connected with God: for, “in the act of his production there
may be conceived some connexion, and Adam to have been in a momental Navel with his
Maker…In his immortal and diviner part he seemed to hold a nearer coherence, and an
umbilicality even with God himself” (Browne 1672, 278).
Not everyone agreed however. Five years later the Scotsman Alexander Ross, in his Arcana
Microcosmi: OR, The Hid Secrets of MAN’s BODY Discovered. In an Anatomical Duel Between
Aristotle and Galen Concerning the Parts Thereof (1651), refuted Browne by insisting that
Adam and Eve must have had belly buttons. Browne, Ross says:

[Q]uarrels with the pictures of Adam and Eve with Navels, accounting those parts in
them uselesse superfluities; because the use of the Navell is to continue the infant unto
the mother, and by the vessels thereof to convey its aliments. The Navell, which is the
center of the body, was not uselesse or superfluous in Adam or Eve; because they were

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ornaments, without which the belly had been deformed: Therefore Solomon amongst
other beautifull ornaments of the Church, puts in the Navel for one, Thy Navel, saith he,
is like a round Goblet, Cant. 7.2. He might as well quarrel with the picture for giving
haire to Adam and Eve; for the sole use of haire both for head and chin, is for ornament
and distinction. (Ross 1651, 157)

Ross thus agreed with Vitruvius and, as demonstrated here, with Dürer, in considering that the
navel was conceived at the very “centre” of the body and was required for beauty rather than
function. This did not settle the matter, however. In 1668 John Evelyn, in the opening address
“To the Reader” of his English translation of Roland Fréart’s An Idea of the Perfection of
Painting, criticised the painting of Adam and Eve by Jan Gossaert (c.1520, held in the Royal
Collection, London) for its lack of fidelity to the Bible, particularly in the inclusion of an
“Artificial stone-Fountain carv’d with imagerys in the midst of his Paradise,” and navels on the
“bellys” of “our first Parents” (Fréart 1668, n.p.). Horace Walpole went on to quote Evelyn’s
concerns in passing in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–71; Walpole 1782, i, 84).
And much later William Blake took the side of Browne and Evelyn when representing Eve
without a navel in his watercolour Angel of the Divine Presence Bringing Eve to Adam of c.1803
(held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The debate rumbled on, well into the modern era. In 1857 (two years before Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) Philip Gosse published Omphalos (the Greek for navel),
which argued that Adam and Eve must have had navels, even though they had not been born, for
the same reasons that God decided to plant fossils in the rocks that appeared to be older than the
biblical age of the planet. It would seem that the act of creation now needed a biological
foundation in order to be credible. In 1944, two celebrated anthropologists, Gene Weltfish and
Ruth Benedict, co-authored a pamphlet entitled The Races of Mankind published by the U.S.
Government Printing Office. The point of the publication was to emphasise that all people were
of a common stock and brothers and sisters under the skin. Aimed at the general public, the text
was reinforced with cartoon figures drawn by Ad Reinhardt. Those of Adam and Eve were
depicted with an innocent looking dot in the middle of the abdomen. A Congressman named Carl
T. Durham objected to the publication on the grounds that the Government Printing Office
should not be sponsoring such “anti-biblical propaganda,” and tried to introduce a motion to have

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the pamphlet removed from their listings (Gardner 2001, 8). His motion failed, thus putting the
Congress on record as approving the “fact” that Adam and Eve had navels.
In this long-running, if somewhat overlooked, debate, questions as to the fidelity of image
and theology have thus quite literally focused at a single point. Of course, leaving aside the
geometrically ideal and divine attributes of the body signaled by the belly button, its prominence
on Dürer’s Adam and Eve made the pair recognisably human. Both figures are simultaneously of
miraculous conception whilst ultimately, or so it is implied, of exactly the same form as all the
rest of us. Their navels are a potent sign of an umbilical cord connecting the pair to mankind, not
to their creator. As Browne concluded in 1646, this ambiguity lay at the very heart of their
identity. To ponder Dürer’s image is truly to “navel gaze.”

Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the librarians at the University of Bath and the Rare Books
Department of Cambridge University Library, and the staff of the British Museum Department of
Prints and Drawings.

REFERENCES

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Collections of the British Museum, London. Accessed August 18, 2016.
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Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accessed August 18, 2016.
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/336222
Conway, William Martin. 1889. Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer. Cambridge: Cambridge
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/literaryremains00eckegoog#page/n1/mode/2up
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FIGURE REFERENCE

(Figure 3) Dürer, Albrecht. “Additional Manuscript, 5230 fol. 2.” Vitruvian Man. British Library,
London: British Library Board.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vaughan Hart: Professor of Architecture, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering,
University of Bath, UK

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The International Journal of Arts Theory and History is

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one of four thematically focused journals in the family of
journals that support the Arts and Society Research
Network—its journals, book imprint, conference, and
online community. It is a section of The International
Journal of the Arts in Society.

The International Journal of Arts Theory and History

interrogates arts histories, theories, and paradigms. It
focuses on frameworks for critical analysis of arts
practices and their relationships to society.

The International Journal of Theory and History

is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal.

ISSN 2326-9952