Jean Cousin

A woman lies stretched out in a rocky cave, her hand on a skull, a snake and an apple beside her, and an inscription above her reads Eva Prima Pandora. The Latin means Eve, the first Pandora, and the painting joins the Bible's first woman to the Greek myth of the woman who let evil loose into the world. Jean Cousin painted it around 1550, and it is often described as the first great female nude in French painting. It has been in the Louvre since 1922.

Cousin was born around 1490 near Sens, a cathedral city south-east of Paris. There he worked as a surveyor and a designer of stained glass before moving to Paris around 1540, where he designed tapestries on the life of Saint Mammès for the cathedral of Langres. Very few paintings can be given to him with certainty, and for centuries his work was confused with that of his son, also named Jean Cousin. In 1560 he published a Book of Perspective, a practical manual for painters.