Albrecht Dürer's engraving 'Adam and Eve' is one of the artist's most famous and well-known works. The period leading up to its completion was marked by numerous sketches, inspired in part by ancient art. This website looks at the various preparatory sketches before focusing on the engraving itself. The analysis concludes with the development of the Adam and Eve motif in the form of an oversized oil painting.
Dürer's study of a nude (pictured left), now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, offers a unique insight into his working methods. The woman, holding a fruit in her right hand, probably represents the figure of Eve in the Garden of Eden; her left hand is missing. The vertical line running through Eve's body suggests that Dürer created this drawing in accordance with his own theories on human proportions. The Ashmolean Museum believes that the drawing shown here is probably the earliest study for Dürer's figure of Eve; the vertical line does not appear in later works. ↗ashmolean.org
The second drawing (on the right) looks much more mature. Both the hair and the left hand have been completed. Dürer enhanced the drawing by adding a dark background and his signature. The figure was further completed, with particular attention paid to the effects of light and shadow. Courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. ↗britishmuseum.org
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