Ways of Conceptualizing World-Making

An artist living at the end of the twelfth century in France contributed to the miniature illustration of the Bible de Souvigny by painting the creation of the world. Until the sixth day, everything is in order: day after day, God creates light, the firmament, the earth, the animals. The first deviation by the artist from the Biblical text concerns the seventh day when, instead of resting – as he should, according to Genesis – God creates Adam and Eve. Even less predictably, the miniaturist adds an eighth day to the creation of the world: it is the day of the original sin when, having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve realize that the Garden of Eden is only one possible world. This example immediately confirms what any historian of Christian art knows: that representations of the making of the world by God may tell us more about the artist's experience of the world surrounding her (or, more usually, him) than about the Book of Genesis. Furthermore, this representation also demonstrates the plurality of ways of world-making. World-making takes place in at least three different ways here: the creation of the world by God, the discovery of another world by humans, and the expression of the world of art. For our purposes, this example frames three fundamental, interrelated questions that are posed once our perspective on the world focuses on the making of the world: