Cleveland Museum of Art
Adam and Eve
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- 1504
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, early 16th Century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 135067
From LinkedCulture
Just before the first bite, Adam and Eve exist in a state of total perfection, and Dürer used that single frozen moment to attempt something radical. In this 1504 engraving, he constructed both figures using a mathematical system of proportion, modeling Adam's pose directly on the ancient Roman Apollo Belvedere. A parrot perches on a branch above Adam's hand, a serpent coils through the tree beside Eve, and animals gather in the shadowed ground below. For Dürer, depicting sinless bodies was a pathway to understanding divine creation itself.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
Dürer based Adam’s pose on the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman sculpture discovered in Italy during the late 1400s. He constructed the idealized bodies of Adam and Eve using geometry and a mathematical system of proportion loosely derived from ancient models. For Dürer, who mostly depicted Christian subjects, the creation of theoretically perfect human bodies was a pathway to comprehending the divine. He thus represented Adam and Eve as he understood them in both theological and artistic terms: moments before tasting the forbidden fruit, they are still uncorrupted by sin and death, existing in a state of faultless beauty.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.