Expulsion of Adam and Eve

This is a small panel, about 43 by 31 centimetres, made to be looked at close up rather than hung high on a wall. For it Pontormo looked back roughly a hundred years, to the Brancacci Chapel across Florence, where Masaccio had painted Adam and Eve driven from Eden around 1425. That fresco was the benchmark every local painter measured himself against.

The date of Pontormo's version is genuinely unsettled, placed anywhere from about 1519 to the early 1540s, though the Uffizi holds it at around 1535. The painting even lost its author for a time. In the Medici inventory of 1796 it was recorded as the work of Francesco Salviati, a younger Florentine painter, and the mistake stood until 1825.

The clearest debt to Masaccio is the serpent, coiled around the tree at the gate of Eden, lifted almost directly from the older fresco.