Adam en Eva in het paradijs

This engraving depicts Adam and Eve as idealized figures in a lush landscape populated by diverse animals, including lions, elephants, and a hedgehog. Eve reaches toward the Tree of Knowledge to offer the forbidden fruit to Adam, while a human-headed serpent watches from the branches above. The scene is framed by dense foliage and a distant mountain range, rendered with the precise, swelling lines characteristic of the Haarlem school.

This work represents the foundational myth of the Fall of Man, which in Western esoteric traditions like Hermeticism and Neoplatonism is often interpreted as the 'descent' of the divine intellect or 'Anthropos' into the world of matter and generation.