The Fall of Man

The panel is more than two metres tall and less than 90 centimetres wide, and Coxie fills that narrow height with the moment before everything goes wrong. Eve reaches for the fruit under the tree where the serpent waits, and Adam sits beside her. The two bodies are large, weighty nudes of a kind Coxie had studied in Rome during the 1530s, before he came home to Mechelen, where he was a master in the painters' guild by 1539. He painted this around 1550, on oak, as the partner of an Expulsion from Paradise of exactly the same size.