Adam and Eve in Paradise

A rare non-saint, non-Marian subject from the tradition: Adam and Eve before the Fall, shown in an Eden that colonial painters routinely rendered with recognizably Andean and imported-tropical flora and fauna rather than a generic European garden — llamas and native birds turning up alongside lions and European game animals in scenes meant to be universal.

Genesis narrative scenes were painted across the Spanish colonial world as teaching images — this one likely furnished a home or a catechetical space, walking a viewer through the paradise that would shortly be lost, in a landscape that would have looked, to an Andean eye, at least partly like home.

Notice how the landscape does the work here more than the figures do — paradise is a place before it is a story.