Adam och Eva - Cranachs Ateljé
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The painting from Lucas Cranachs workshop depicts a very significant motif. It could be a delightful picture of a man and woman tasting a juicy apple in their garden. The tree they are standing in front of is so big that it fills the whole width of the picture, and there are lots of apples left to eat! But it is one of the Christian story of the creation’s strongest scenes Cranach has painted: The Fall of Man or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as the motif is also called. The painting is from around 1530.
The Bible relates that which Cranach has painted: The snake lures Eve to eat from the forbidden tree by promising her that mankind shall be as God and understand what good and evil are. Eve eats some and offers some to Adam, her man, who also tastes the apple. What happens next is that their eyes open and they see that they are naked. God enters this event and, to make a long story short, Adam blames Eve who blames the snake. They are forced to leave the Garden of Eden for a new hard life and the unity of God and mankind is broken.
It is not necessarily so that a picture motif means only one thing or the other. Theories have been forwarded that our painting is a picture of ordinary physical love between a man and a woman. Eve’s body posture with the stretched up toe and all her attention on Adam has been considered to underline such.
Lucas Cranach was considered one of Germany’s most important artists at the beginning of the 16th Century. He was born in 1472. One of his friends was Martin Luther, a friendship that influenced his art. Luther’s reformation, that is criticism of the Roman church, could be one reason Cranach painted a number of pictures depicting the Fall of Man or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
The painting was donated to the museum in 1885 after having been up at auction the year before. It probably came to Sweden in the middle of the 17th Century as a war-trophy during the Thirty Years' War.
