Temptation of Adam and Eve

At the tree of knowledge the serpent - here given a woman's head, as medieval artists often imagined it - tempts Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, the disobedience that brings sin and death into the world (Genesis 3:1-7). Masolino paints them as serene, elegant nudes, smooth and untroubled, in the refined International Gothic manner. The panel hangs in the Brancacci Chapel directly opposite Masaccio's Expulsion, and the two make one of art history's most instructive pairings: Masolino's graceful calm before the Fall against his younger partner's raw, anguished realism after it.