The Fall of Man

In a single field of the Sistine ceiling Michelangelo tells two moments at once. At the left, in a green Eden, Adam and Eve reach for the fruit the serpent offers - a creature with a woman's torso coiled around the tree; at the right, an angel's sword drives them out, suddenly aged and cowering, into a barren waste (Genesis 3). The bodies say everything, confident and full before the Fall, shrunken and ashamed after. The serpent-woman echoes the one in Hugo van der Goes's panel, and Durer's engraved Adam and Eve is also in this collection - three reckonings with the same story.