Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Masaccio)

Cast out of paradise for disobeying God, Adam and Eve are driven through the gate beneath an angel's sword (Genesis 3:23-24). Adam buries his face in shame while Eve throws back her head and wails, her features contorted in raw, audible grief. Masaccio strips the pair of all idealization - the bodies heavy, sunlit, casting real shadows - giving the Fall an unprecedented human weight. Frescoed about 1425 in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, it stands at the threshold of the Renaissance; painted at the very same moment as Gentile da Fabriano's ornate Adoration, also in this collection, it points the opposite way, toward stark realism and feeling. Generations of artists, Michelangelo among them, came to study it.