The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man

This paradise was painted around 1615 by two friends working on the same panel. Rubens laid in the figures, the pale bodies of Adam and Eve and the horse, while Jan Brueghel the Elder filled the rest with animals, roughly a hundred of them, painted with the precision of a naturalist. The two men made almost 20 pictures together this way. What Brueghel packed in is a kind of catalogue of a widening world, turkeys newly arrived from North America, monkeys from South America, birds of paradise from New Guinea, all sharing one meadow in peace. The peace is about to end. Eve has taken the apple from the serpent coiled in the tree and is turning to hand it to Adam.