Adam and Eve

Lucas Cranach painted this subject more than fifty times in his workshop at Wittenberg, where he was court painter to the Electors of Saxony and the close friend of Martin Luther. The Fall of Man let a Protestant painter show the nude while telling the story of sin and grace. Look at Eve's hair falling over her shoulder, at her tiny feet and long thighs, which belong to a Gothic ideal of beauty rather than an Italian one, and at Adam's gesture of confusion, which Cranach repeated in version after version because it made people smile. The winged serpent in the tree top is the mark that Cranach used to sign his pictures, found here as a small emblem on the panel.

The painting is one of the most important German Renaissance pictures in Poland and hangs in the old masters gallery near the Botticelli. It entered the museum's collection in the twentieth century. Cranach's Adam and Eve pictures were spread across the courts of Europe by his patrons and admirers, and this is a fine example of the type at its most elegant, made when the painter was in his sixties.

Did You Know? Cranach signed his paintings with a winged serpent, a device granted to him as a coat of arms by the Elector of Saxony in 1508.