Adam and Eve

This small panel, about a metre high, is among the first things Raphael painted in the Vatican, around 1508 or 1509, and it carries a memory of Florence, where he had spent the previous few years. Eve stands holding a branch of the tree and offers the fruit to Adam, who sits beside her. Scholars have seen in her pose an echo of Leonardo da Vinci's Leda, a lost painting of a standing nude that Raphael had copied in a pen drawing while he was in Florence. That drawing survives in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The leafy sprigs covering the couple probably follow a well-known print by Albrecht Dürer.

The two figures stand against a gold ground painted to look like mosaic. The panel sits next to the roundel of Theology, on the same side of the room as the Disputation, the great fresco of the sacrament below. Some writers have given it to Sodoma, the painter from Siena who was already working on this ceiling when Raphael arrived.