Pinacoteca Room XVI

Choose one animal in Wenzel Peter’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Before trying to count the crowd, notice how the painter distinguishes its body, posture and surface from the creatures around it. Peter specialized in animal painting. In this large canvas, he brought more than two hundred animals from different parts of the world into the setting of the biblical garden. The people named in the title share their space with a much larger variety of animal life. You can spend a while moving between a familiar creature and another you have yet to recognize. Pope Gregory XVI bought twenty works by Peter in 1831 to furnish a room in the papal apartments. The painting’s place in a museum continues that history of collecting his work. Give one small part of the canvas a closer look. A single animal shows the attention to form and behaviour that the much larger gathering depends on.