Adam and Eve

Gossart’s style, which blends Italian form with Flemish characteristics, also shows the influence of D�rer, whose engravings carried the classical canons of art across all of northern Europe.

This painting is the earliest example in Gossart’s oeuvre of the theme of Adam and Eve, a subject that preoccupied him over the course of his thirty-year career. It is closely based on D�rer’s 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve, which presents the culmination of D�rer’s nearly four-year study of these two figures. Gossart exchanged D�rer’s dense forest backdrop and animal inhabitants for a clearing at the edge of the woods, with a small pond behind the figures and an open view to a meadow and hills beyoynd at the left. This landscape construction is generally characteristic of the works Gerard David painted in Bruges in the same period.