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Adam's Gate (Adamspforte in German) is the main entrance into the thousand year-old Bamberg Cathedral. The gate was finished after a reconstruction of the cathedral in about 1235.
The gate is adorned by six statues. To the left are Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, Emperor Henry II, the founder of the Cathedral, and his wife Cunigunde.
It was common in Romanesque and Gothic art, to have a ruling couple facing the first humans, thus, to the right are statues of Adam and Eve, together with a statue of the first pope, Saint Peter, one of the patron saints of the cathedral.
Adam and Eve are considered the first man and woman and the ancestors of all humans in all three Abrahamic religions. Special consideration is given to them in the Book of Genesis in the Christian Old Testament.
The statue of Eve was the first life-sized statue of a nude woman since the end of Classical Antiquity. Considering that such sculptures were not widely accepted until the dawn of Renaissance, this one is 300 years ahead of its time.
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