Eva rækker æblet til Adam 18th century

This print of Adam and Eve, made by Johann Elias Ridinger, visualizes the moment when Eve offers Adam the apple. It is currently located at the Statens Museum for Kunst. This engraving from eighteenth-century Germany blends biblical narrative with then-current European fascinations. The composition centres on Adam and Eve, but the surrounding bestiary also holds significance. Exotic animals, like rhinoceroses, indicate a European hunger for the natural wonders colonizers were encountering. And the landscape, while ostensibly the Garden of Eden, is patterned after European aristocratic gardens. Ridinger’s work, then, reveals the social conditions that shaped artistic production. It served both religious and secular needs, communicating moral lessons while feeding into an expanding culture of collecting and display. To more fully understand this work, we might also look at prints made in other European countries around the same time and reflect on the role of zoological gardens in the eighteenth century.