The Fall of Man

The museum dates this small Fall of Man to after 1537, when Cranach was in his mid-60s, some four decades after the Crucifixion he had painted in Vienna around 1500, which hangs in the same collection. Adam has his arm around Eve's waist. She has hers across his shoulders and is already lifting the apple to her mouth, while her other hand holds the branch where the serpent is coiled. Behind them a stag lies calmly on the grass. The panel reached Vienna because of the Napoleonic wars. In the 17th century it belonged to Guidobald Thun, prince-archbishop of Salzburg from 1654 to 1668, and it remained in the archbishops' residence. When the archbishopric was secularised in 1803 and Salzburg passed to Austria in 1805, its pictures were claimed for the emperor, and this one was brought to the imperial collection in Vienna in 1806.