Temptation of Adam

Eve holds out the apple and Adam hesitates, two bodies glowing against a dark Venetian landscape. John Ruskin called these dark Tintorettos the supremest work, as far as he knew, in all the world.

The story behind the painting

Tintoretto painted this Adam and Eve, also known as The Temptation of Adam, Original Sin and The Fall of Man, around 1550 to 1553. It was made for the Scuola della Trinità in Venice, for which he painted four or five pictures taken from the Book of Genesis, about the creation of the world. Only two survive untouched, The Death of Abel and this one. Wikidata dates the canvas to the 1550s and gives its size as 150 by 220 cm. It now belongs to the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice.

What to look for

The picture shows Eve in the act of offering the apple to Adam, and it has long been admired for the beauty of its flesh painting. The writer William Roscoe Osler saw the influence of ancient sculpture in the figures, joined to a deep knowledge of nature and of the build of the human body. He found the landscape striking too, not close to Titian's landscapes but pointing to a new, poetic direction, and he thought traces of Andrea Schiavone's influence could still be seen in it.

Meaning and intent

For Osler the concentration of effect was marvellous without being violent, and he believed landscapes like this probably had a deep effect on Rubens, Rembrandt and Turner. Ruskin, standing in the Accademia, described the two Genesis pictures hung over the doors on either side of Titian's Assumption as darkness visible with flashes of lightning through it, a thunder cloud rent with fire. To him they were the finest possible Tintorettos. The moment chosen is the instant before the Fall, when the choice is still open.

Legacy

Decades later, around 1577 to 1578, Tintoretto painted the subject again for a ceiling panel in the Upper Hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Evelyn March Phillipps described that oval with Eve leaning back in thick foliage, a sunbeam across her limbs, and Adam half in shade gently pushing her hand away while a serpent glides off. She judged that it could not compare with the Accademia painting. So the earlier canvas remains the reference version, and Ian Holbourn called the later one sketchy but very strong.