Adam and Eve in Paradise

Adam and Eve in Paradise, painted by Francesco Solimena around 1700, shows the first couple at the moment of the Fall — Eve turning with the apple in her raised hand while Adam half-recoils at her side, the serpent coiled in the tree above them. Solimena, the dominant painter of Naples at the turn of the century, sets the drama in a lush Eden of dense foliage and warm, theatrical light, the two pale bodies standing out against the deep greens and the glowing sky beyond. The picture has all the grand rhetoric of the late Baroque — billowing drapery, heroic gestures, a storm of feeling — yet it keeps an almost operatic stillness at its centre, the fruit of knowledge held aloft in the evening air. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.