This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting.
_Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman, Pandora, with Eve, from the Book of Genesis.
We all know the story of Eve, but as a reminder, Pandora’s myth was written first in Hesiod’s writings, which date from the 8-7th century BCE. Pandora was created by Zeus as a way to punish humanity for having received the gift of fire against his will. Pandora means “all-gifted,” and she was strikingly beautiful but overly curious, and so opened a jar that contained all the evil things that forever after plagued humankind.
As Hesiod wrote, “for from her is the race of women and female kind . . . (Women) live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth”. (Theogany, 590-593)
Jean Cousins here shows Eve and Pandora as similar beings — they are beautiful but the source of pain. You can see her arm resting upon a skull, representing death. Her hand rests upon a jar. Eve of course was also the first woman whose curiosity generated mortal suffering, in Biblical writings. Cousins was not alone in associating the two beings, which left a deep impression in Western cultural beliefs about the the legacy of harm that women (and their beauty and curiosity) have brought upon the human condition.
