Jan Gossaert (Jean Gossart), 'Adam and Eve', about 1520

The foreground of this painting is filled with the naked, almost life-size figures of Adam and Eve, who seem almost too large for the space they inhabit. They have just tasted the forbidden fruit. The apple that Eve tries to hide behind her has a bite taken out of it. The consequences of their action are beginning to dawn on them. Adam gazes at Eve and points to his open mouth, his face full of anxiety. His twisting body and the patterns of light and shade on his muscles mimic the tree trunk and bark immediately behind him. He seems both to cling to Eve and recoil from her, while she stares dolefully in front of her, as if realising their fate. Above them is the serpent that has brought about the Fall. It twines around the branch of the tree, its coils echoing their entwined arms and the curls of Eve’s hair.

The trees that frame and press in on the couple – presumably the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – form a gateway which seems already to cut them off from the distant woods, hills and fountains of the Garden of Eden. They have stepped through onto barren rocky ground, with just two plants in the foreground: sea holly symbolising lust, and columbine, the fear of God.

Gossaert painted numerous versions of this scene, of which this is the largest. Although he was clearly familiar with Albrecht Dürer’s seminal 1504 print of Adam and Eve, Gossaert’s concerns are different: he was interested less in classical balance and ideal beauty, and more in linear patterns and interlocking nude forms. In place of Dürer’s more static treatment, here the contorted, unbalanced figures fill the scene with tension. Overwhelmed by shame and horror at what they have done, they clutch at each other, their fingers digging into each other’s flesh as if they might literally fall.

According to Lodovico Guicciardini, writing in the 1560s, Gossaert was the first painter to introduce historical and mythological subjects with nude figures to the Netherlands. His patron, Philip of Burgundy (1464–1524), was a passionate lover of antiquity. In 1508 Philip took the artist on a diplomatic mission to Rome, instructing him to make drawings of ancient monuments there. Gossaert’s interest in classical sculpture is evident in the way he painted the human body. He is one of only a few Netherlandish painters known to have studied antiquities in this way.