For obvious reasons, I take a certain interest in other people’s takes on the Eden myth, and my eye was caught by a newspaper story about this painting ‘The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man’, painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in 1613.
What strikes me as brilliant about this beautiful image is the way that Adam and Eve, on the point (according to the story) of changing the entire course of human history, are tiny figures in the background who you’d barely notice if their significance hadn’t been signalled by the painting’s title.
The painting is like a seventeenth century version of the flashback scene that I wrote about in a previous post. Significant events, events whose consequences will be felt for millenia, don’t come labelled as such, and may look at the time like little details, hardly worth noticing at all.