The Fall of Man

Far back on the left, a cloud with a human face and hands is God, warning Adam and Eve that they may eat from anything in the garden except one. In the foreground the warning is already lost. The two stand at the tree of knowledge, and the serpent coiled in its branches, offering the fruit, has a human upper body. Cornelis van Haarlem painted them almost as tall as life, on a canvas nearly three metres high, and he crowded the ground around them with animals. A dog lies at the lower left beside a fox, a monkey hugs a cat at the foot of the trunk, an owl watches from a branch, and frogs and slugs cross the bare earth. He signed and dated the picture on the stone under Eve's foot, 1592.