Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, mid-16th century, Abbey church of Mont-Saint-Michel, France.
Inside the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, a mid-16th-century Caen-stone relief compresses the drama of Genesis 3 from the Bible into a single, charged scene. At the right side rises a tree full of apples. Coiled around its trunk clings a devilish figure, part human, part serpent, its horned head leaning toward Eve as one clawed hand offers the forbidden fruit. Adam stands close, torn between resistance and desire.
To the right, the consequence unfolds with striking force. A powerful angel strides forward, wings spread and sword raised, driving the pair out of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve shrink under the heavenly command: shoulders bent, arms crossed over their bare bodies, faces averted from the paradise they can no longer enter.
Carved during the French Renaissance, when sculptors combined late-Gothic sharpness with new attention to anatomy and movement, the relief captures in one sweep the temptation, judgment, and expulsion that mark the beginning of human history. More than five centuries on, the stone still brims with the urgency of that first exile.
