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Eve leans on the Tree of Knowledge, touches Adam with her knee and hands him the apple. In this small Prague panel Cranach made her the one who acts, exactly as the theology of his Reformation world wanted.

The story behind the painting

Lucas Cranach the Elder returned to Adam and Eve again and again from 1509 on. This version, oil on limewood and dated around 1538, belongs to that long series of Falls of Man, alongside panels in Besançon from about 1508 to 1510 and in Florence from 1528. The National Gallery Prague acquired it in 1949 from the Cistercian monastery at Osek, near Duchcov. Cranach signed it on the tree trunk at lower right with his emblem, a winged snake with folded wings. Infrared reflectography found only an outline drawing beneath the paint.

What to look for

The panel is small, about 50 by 34 cm. Eve holds a branch with her left hand and props the sole of her bent right foot against the trunk. Her knee touches Adam, and with her right hand she offers him an apple. Adam stands a little behind her, in front of a thick bush, his left hand resting on her shoulder. In his right hand he holds a twig that covers both of them. Look at how close the bodies are: in Cranach's earliest versions, from Besançon, Munich and Coburg, the two stand under a central tree and do not touch at all.

Meaning and intent

The source describes the stress on Eve's active role as in line with Reformation theology: she is the temptress who leads Adam into sin, an idea summed up in the period phrase Weibermacht, the power of women, which blamed everything bad on the woman. Later Cranach versions of Original Sin usually set the couple in an Eden full of animals and keep Eve as the temptress. Yet he could reverse the roles too: a composition of 1537 in Vienna shows an active Adam embracing Eve and offering her the apple.

Legacy

Cranach's workshop carried the theme forward. Around 1550 his successor Anton Heusler painted a later Adam and Eve, also now in the National Gallery Prague, that changes the composition and shows both figures completely naked, without the covering twig. Seen side by side, the two Prague panels show how one workshop kept reshaping the same story. Wikipedia dates this panel c. 1538, and Wikidata gives 1538. Today it hangs in Prague, a quiet piece of a series that runs through the painter's whole career.