The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise

In Genesis, Eve takes the fruit and then gives some to Adam. Michelangelo, painting this panel around 1509 or 1510, changed that. Here Adam reaches up into the tree himself and pulls at a branch, while Eve, half reclining below, takes the fruit from the tempter's hand. The tree is a fig, the tree whose leaves the couple will soon use to cover themselves. Coiled around its trunk is a serpent with a woman's body down to the waist, a form for the tempter that painters had used long before him.

The same tree splits the panel in two. On the right an angel in red drives the pair out with a sword. Eve cowers with her arms drawn in, and Adam holds up his hands to ward off the blade.

That stooping, shamed couple has long been compared with the Expulsion that Masaccio painted in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, frescoes Michelangelo had studied and copied as a young man. In the same chapel, facing Masaccio's scene, Masolino's Temptation also gives the serpent a woman's head.