Paradise

This panel tells the Bible's first story all at once, scattered across a single landscape, and it reads roughly from right to left. At the right edge God shapes a small Adam out of the earth. Elsewhere in the garden Eve is drawn from the sleeping Adam, the pair take the fruit, and then hide among the bushes while God appears in the clouds to call them out. In the foreground, larger than all the rest, God gives the two of them the one command they are going to break. At the far left an angel drives them out of Paradise. The same figures turn up again and again, an old way of telling a story in a single picture, and Cranach signed and dated the whole thing 1530. Between the episodes the animals of Eden graze in pairs, deer and horses, a bear and a unicorn among them, with swans on the pond and herons and storks along its bank. The picture was listed in 1718 in the imperial gallery at Prague Castle as Adam and Eve in Paradise, and it was brought to Vienna in 1876.