Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Fra Bartolommeo
Italian; 16th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
69%
The Creation of Eve. c1510. Oil on wood
This painting is small and brushy, so I wonder if it was made as some sort of private devotional picture. (The handling, and the way the figures inhabit their surroundings, reminds me a bit of Raphael's predellae.) It's not a screaming success, but there's an undeniable quality to it that demonstrates the high degree of aptitude common to Florentine painters around 1500, even the minor ones. There's an odd variability to the postures — God's stiff lateral configuration; the complex curving and twisting of the Adam/Eve-system; the juxtaposition of this figure group with the weird open trapezoid of the first family to its right — that rhymes with the active forms of the landscape. The gradient in the sky is compelling, but its prettiness is somewhat out of tune with the rest of the picture. (TFS, 2026)