Phillipps, Evelyn March: The frescoes in the Sixtine chapel (London: John Murray, 1901)

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examples as full of soft and feminine quality
as this.
6.—The Temptation and Fall.—As a
scene, this is one of the most beautiful.
The space is filled with extraordinary grace
of line, without crowding. In the centre,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
rises, spreading and stately. The serpent’s
great coils are twisted round its trunk, and
the Evil One, after the example of many a
mediseval painter, and by the permission of
the early Church’s book of rules for sacred
pictures, is given a woman’s head and body.
While Adam stretches out and grasps the
fruit with violent and irresistible longing,
Eve receives it straight from the serpent’s
hand, as if between them were some subtle
mutual understanding, and her expression
and gesture, half-calculating, half-mechani-
cal, is that of one who is counting the cost,
and who feels the fascination of the sin.
Never has Michel Angelo shown more
feeling for beauty than in these two figures;
the line and sweep of both bodies is at once
grand and graceful, and the little head and