The Garden of Eden is one of the great subjects of art and literature, if, indeed, not the greatest. It has the powerful claim of universal relevance and the compelling authority of ancient scripture. The story of Man’s fall from grace and his expulsion from Paradise has occupied artists for millennia, not just because of the story’s religious significance, but for the opportunity it provides to explore the concept of perfection.

It is impossible to view a representation of Eden without a strong sense of witnessing an unfolding drama in which all the beauty and wonder you see will soon be lost. Eden, with its perpetually fruiting trees – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life preeminent among them – and its ambling, semi-docile creatures and fair weather, is briefly described in the second chapter of Genesis. John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, though published in 1667, offers an intensely filmic description of the events that countless artists have sought to visualise. The dreamy innocence of Eden – being a garden, it is a place of pleasure, removed from the cares of the adult world – is childlike. It is the impossibility of return that draws artists and viewers alike as they share in the universal memory of what childhood was or might have been.

The numerous Edenic scenes painted by the German artist Lucas Cranach (c 1472-1553) present the elegant couple of Adam and Eve at the very moment Eve, already tempted by the serpent, is about to offer the forbidden fruit to Adam. Cranach’s works are full of courtly sophistication, but they express human folly and supernatural guile with delicious subtlety nonetheless.

Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, Courtauld Institute of Art, London WC2 (www.courtauld. ac.uk 020-7848 2777), Jun 21-Sept 23

Michelangelo (1475-1564): Original Sin (c 1512) Sistine Chapel ceiling

Michelangelo chooses to depict the moment Eve is given the fruit by the serpent, its upper body disguised as a fellow woman, while Adam reaches into the boughs of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. By juxtaposing this moment with their expulsion from Eden by the sword-wielding Archangel Michael, contained within the borders of the same scene, he allows us to compare the richly verdant landscape of Eden to the left with the utterly desolate flatness of the plain to the right. The fresco is a moral tale in its entirety.

Chapman Brothers: Tragic Anatomies (1996)

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s infamous installation, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, presented a freakish interpretation of the Eden story. That these distorted mannequins were of children is significant, emphasising the innocent state prevailing in the mythical Garden of Eden, one in which innocent sexual exploration was presumably enjoyable without the carnal understanding of which adults are all too aware. The work raises the question as to the nature of original sin: without the knowledge of good and evil, can sin be said to exist?

Hieronymous Bosch (c 1415-1516): Garden of Earthly Delights (c 1504) Museo del Prado

This famous triptych depicts the creation of the world and Man in the centre panel, the Garden of Eden to the left and Hell to the right. When the flanking panels are closed over the centre scene they reveal, many believe, the end of the Deluge that swamped the Earth. The delicate order that permeates Eden, where God in the form of Jesus appears presenting Eve to Adam, is gradually unravelled as the eye travels to the centre panel. There, the pleasures of the flesh delight both its human inhabitants and the viewer, before the consequences of human greed are manifest in the hellish scene to the right.

WOULD YOU ADAM AND EVE IT?

The Eden Project is turning “Garden of Eden” to give the public the opportunity to visit just as nature intended – in the nude. The event takes place for just four hours and 2,500 visitors are expected. (www.redletterdays.co.uk/ gardenofeden 0845 6007635) Thur, 7-11pm, £49 GEORGE WYNDHAM

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