LIGETI Miklós
1871, Buda – 1944, Budapest

Adam and Eve

1899
marble and bronze

Adam and Eve, Miklós Ligeti’s salon statue is a special item in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery, with a function the forms a transition between fine and applied art. The hair of the marble children was originally painted, and there used to be red glass fruits among the leaves of the bronze tree, with light bulbs inside, whose cables ran through the hollow trunk.
The piece received a bronze medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. This was one of several works in which Ligeti used a variety of materials and colours, a practice that was in line with international endeavours at the end of the nineteenth century that sought to reflect on the variety of antique sculpture in the light of the new findings of archaeology. The execution is not the only thing to make Adam and Eve an interesting composition: its iconographic programme is also unconventional, as it represents the ancestors of humanity as children. Some believe Ligeti identified the period of paradisiacal innocence before the Fall with childhood.