So shame, which rightly belongs to the rebellious human will, gets deflected to the genitals, and every fig leaf so strategically placed reinforces the deflection. Our sexual organs become pudenda, literally “the shameful parts.” It’s curious that this term is more often used to describe women’s anatomy. Consider, for instance, Masaccio’s great Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: Adam bends forward in grief, his hands covering his eyes—but the eyes of the two, once opened, can’t truly be closed—and his penis clearly visible. This is intentional: we see him from the right, with his left foot forward. Had Masaccio placed the right foot forward, our view would have been blocked. But we see Eve’s wailing face clearly, because her right hand covers her breasts, her left her vulva, which is partly obscured anyway by her right leg. She and Adam are out of step. Adam’s posture suggests that he does not want to see, Eve’s that she does not want to be seen, though no one could be looking, as the angel with the flaming sword hovers behind them. Everything in their portrayal suggests that they feel two different shames. Adam’s is closer to the Biblical account, Eve’s to the Augustinian shifting of responsibility to the genitals, the pudenda. If Adam’s shame comports with the Genesis narrative, Masaccio’s overall depiction seems not to, since we are told that God clothed them in “skin coats” before he dismissed them from their Garden. But Masaccio restores them to the moment they discovered their nakedness, thus telescoping the story, emphasizing the connection between exposure and expulsion.

Some centuries later, one of the Medicis ordered fig leaves painted onto the bodies of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, though presumably not out of a concern for Biblical fidelity. It became common to correct the artists of the Renaissance in this way: some of the classical statuary at the Vatican was similarly covered, and when the Duke of Tuscany presented Queen Victoria with a plaster replica of Michaelangelo’s David in 1857 (cast from the original), she immediately gave the thing to the South Kensington Museum—now the Victoria & Albert—whose authorities in turn commissioned a fig leaf to give the Biblical hero proper coverage. As V&A documents tell the story, the plaster leaf “was then kept in readiness for any royal visits, when it was hung on the figure using two strategically placed hooks.” Today, David has regained his original nudity, but the leaf has been preserved: it sits in its own case just behind the statue, which is a good thing, for the leaf is a fine piece of work, elegantly formed.

We all know, or think we know, about “Victorian prudishness,” but even as we smile we should remember to distinguish the link between sex and sin from the link between nudity and shame. The former was not created by Augustine, but he is our primary source for it, and he forged that link so strongly that for many centuries it has been hard to see the nude Adam and Eve without thinking Augustinian thoughts. It might never occur to us that the miserable pair could be ashamed not of their organs’ connection with sex but rather with the elimination of waste. (In some cultures this is a far more private matter than sex.) But if we could purge all such Augustinian assumptions from our minds, we would still be left, I think, with some discomfort—or, the story suggests, that’s what we should feel. How do we experience the nakedness of our First Parents? To take an oddly echoing episode from later in Genesis that clearly has no sexual context: Are we like Ham, the son of Noah, who not only looked upon his father’s nakedness as the old man lay drunk in his tent but also told his brothers about it? Do we, like Ham, experience no sense that Noah’s nakedness was shameful, no desire to cover him and restore him to decency? Or would we be like Ham’s brothers, who turned their heads away as they covered Noah and thereby saved him from further shame? The text says that when Noah awoke he “knew what his youngest son had done to him.” We think, done to him? What have we done to Adam and Eve by looking upon their nakedness? Yet for his impudence Ham was cursed.

W. H. Auden, thinking of statues and saints, wrote that “The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, / Having nothing to hide.” But we are not among the blessed; like Adam and Eve and Noah, we have much to hide, much that we would not have exposed. And nudity, while it can stand for many other human conditions—innocence, blessedness, desire—remains our strongest image of that exposure, that shame.