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

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Read by Richard Ayoade

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)

See full exhibition for Genesis 3:1–13

Genesis 3:1–13

Revised Standard Version

3 Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” 2And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” 4But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. 5For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” 10And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” 11He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12The man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.”

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