Image Details

Scala/Art Resource, New York, NY

Eve offers Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, represented here as a fig tree. Coiling around the tree, the serpent, portrayed with a female human head, watches the outcome of its guile.

Flanking scenes in this illumination for a 15th-century antiphonary in the Museo Opera de Duomo in Florence, Italy, are chronological episodes from the Garden of Eden narrative. Counterclockwise from upper left, we see a kingly God, with cherubim looking over his shoulder, creating Adam “of dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7); God creating Eve from the rib of the sleeping Adam (Genesis 2:21–22); the fig leaf-covered Adam and Eve, after they had learned shame (Genesis 3:7); and a sword-bearing angel driving Adam and Eve from the Garden (Genesis 3:24).