LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Courtauld Institute of Art will feature Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, on view from 21 June – 23 September. The Courtauld will hold the first exhibition in Britain devoted to the German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1555). The exhibition focuses on the Courtauld’s great Adam and Eve, painted in 1526. This subject was ideally suited to Cranach’s gifts as a portrayer of landscape, animals and the female nude. Nor was it one to which either Protestant or Catholic theologians could object.

Cranach and his workshop made over fifty depictions of Eve’s temptation of Adam in Paradise with the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Courtauld Adam and Eve is the only one of his paintings not to follow one of the two basic iconographic interpretations which Cranach developed for this story. Using the evidence provided by technical investigation and drawings, the exhibition will track the process of its making. The painting’s possible meanings for sixteenth-century viewers will also be investigated. Adam and Eve offers particularly close comparisons with a group of secular depictions of temptation and beauty, including the National Gallery’s Venus and Cupid and the Getty’s A Faun and His Family. The exhibition will reunite these paintings for the first time in several hundred years.