In 1504, Albrecht Dürer hung a small sign from a tree branch and signed it in Latin: Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg made this, 1504. It is the proudest signature he ever put on a print, and the work behind it was a boast. Dürer wanted to prove that a northern artist could draw the ideal human body by mathematics, the way the Italians did.
He had spent years working out proportion, and it shows. Adam's stance is usually traced to the ancient Apollo Belvedere, and Eve's to a statue of Venus. Neither figure looks like a person Dürer could have found in Nuremberg, and that was the point. These are bodies built by a system.
Then he filled the forest with riddles. Four animals sit around the couple, and each stands for one of the four temperaments of medieval medicine. The cat is choleric, the rabbit sanguine, the ox phlegmatic, and the elk melancholic. Before the Fall, the theory goes, all four moods were held in balance in Adam, and the animals live together peacefully. Look at the cat's paws and the mouse beside them. Predator and prey are about to stop being friends.
The two trees matter too. Adam grips a branch of mountain ash, a tree of life. Eve holds a fig branch, a tree of knowledge, and the serpent hangs from it with the forbidden fruit in its mouth. A parrot, a creature that repeats what it hears, perches overhead. A mountain goat clings to a rock in the distance, and an old reading takes the goat as a sign of the temptation and fall to come.
The print was a hit. Engravings could be sold across Europe, and this one carried Dürer's name to buyers who would never visit Nuremberg.
Dürer's Adam and Eve appears on our: