Gislebertus

1115–1135), was a French Romanesque sculptor, whose decoration (about 1120–35) of the Cathedral of Saint Lazare at Autun, France – consisting of numerous doorways, tympanums and capitals – represents some of the most original work of the period.

His sculpture is expressive and imaginative: from the terrifying Last Judgment which depicts Jesus's return to Earth, judging all souls (dead and alive) on whether or not they spend eternity in heaven or hell.

(West Tympanum), with its strikingly elongated figures, to the Eve (North Portal), the first large-scale nude in European art since antiquity and a model of sinuous grace.

Earlier examples in France were placed unobtrusively either at the base of a column or more frequently on a capital.Fernand Auberjonois writes that shortly after the mid-18th century the Church "did considerable artistic 'house cleaning' ... replacing Romanesque carvings looked on as barbaric with ornaments more suited to the era's new-found Greco-Roman taste."

Here Gislebertus had portrayed the resurrection of Lazarus, as well as Satan, Adam, and a magnificent Eve whose gesture at the moment she picks the fatal apple is an unrivaled example of absent-minded detachment.

Kirk Ambrose writes: "Gestures in Fall scenes are typically limited to the offering and receiving of the forbidden fruit.

Occasionally, a figure is represented placing a hand to his or her cheek, a traditional gesture of lamentation that appears in earlier Genesis cycles at various moments in the narrative, such as the Shame or Expulsion.… This lamentation gesture is found on an earlier Vezelay capital of the Fall, which most likely dates to Abbot Artaud's building campaign in the first years of the twelfth century and which was reemployed in the nave.

Other sculpted Romanesque examples of this pose in Burgundy include the Eve lintel fragment from Autun and a scene of the Shame on the south tympanum of Anzy-le-Duc.

She disappeared for years, having been carted down to the foot of the hill where the large stone on which she is carved served as building material for a house constructed in 1769.