Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c.1615, Oil on panel, 74.3 x 114.7 cm, The Mauritshuis, The Hague; inv. 253, Scala / Art Resource, NY
A Last Look at Innocence
Commentary by Michael Glover
This collaborative work from relatively early in the seventeenth century shows us a moment of almost joyous loveliness and optimism before the tragedy strikes. This is paradise, lush and wooded, beneath a cheerful sky, frozen in the instant before it turns to paradise no longer.
What a creation this is!
The composition opens up a huge vista of great natural abundance, and the serpent seems to be assisting a liberal apple harvest. Yet this is a genuinely malevolent serpent—coiled round and round the bough of the tree—whose gift of apples to Eve happens almost covertly, from the fly space above this natural stage. A horse looks on, raising a hoof and flaring its nostrils in what may be warning, while a white rabbit—symbol of an innocence and purity to be forever lost?—plays at Adam’s feet.
Eve shows no alarm. Adam looks in no way apprehensive or troubled. It is the teeming, colour-splashed landscape with all its natural life—peacock, ostrich, tiger, and much else—which so preoccupies and beguiles, painted by an artist celebrated for his natural history painting.
Adam and Eve are unashamedly naked (no need for a fig leaf, not yet), and they are surrounded by many of the animals, fish, and fowls of the air that might have been found in paradise, living in a state of blessed harmony, one with another. In the left foreground, for example, is the Bird of Paradise herself, maitre d’ of the scene, a creature unseen in Europe until the sixteenth century (de Rynck 2009: 31).
One detail has an especially poignant theological resonance. Above Adam's head hangs a bunch of grapes, an allusion (it would seem) to the blood that will be shed in payment for this transgression, and of the Eucharist, when it will be drunk to remedy sin’s enduring consequences.
References
de Rynck, Patrick. 2009. Understanding Paintings: Bible Stories and Classical Myths in Art (London: National Gallery)