Paradise

Giovanni di Paolo was the most individual of the Sienese painters of the quattrocento, a master whose visionary imagination sets his work apart from the easier graces of his native city. Painted in 1445, this panel formed part of the predella of the altarpiece that the Guelfi family commissioned for the church of San Domenico at Siena, and it was later separated from its companion, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, which likewise belongs to the Metropolitan Museum. The cycle turns on the oldest of Christian stories, the loss of Eden answered by the promise of the heavenly garden, and the tempera technique with its gilding keeps the small panel within the gold-ground tradition of Sienese devotional painting even as its author gave the theme the strangeness and density of detail that made his reputation. The picture was acquired by the Museum in 1906 through the Rogers Fund.