Adam

In 1648 Swedish troops took Prague and carried off the imperial collections, this panel among them. Its route had begun in Nuremberg. The city council acquired it after the death of Dürer's widow and in 1586 offered it to the Emperor Rudolf II, who kept it in Prague. Six years after the sack, Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted her own collection to be Italian, made a present of the two panels to Philip IV of Spain. That is how a life-size nude painted in 1507, on a plank over two metres tall, came to Madrid. Philip put it with its companion Eve in the vaults beneath the Alcázar that the court called Titian's vaults, where the crown's nude paintings were kept and very few people were let in.