THE GUARDIAN
By Maev Kennedy
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| Adam and Eve are seen as they were painted 500 years ago. Photograph: Andrew Morris/The Fitzwilliam Museum |
Adam and Eve are once again as naked as the day they were created, centuries after some prudish hand wrapped his loins in a grass skirt and draped a veil around her, in an illustrated book to go on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The original naked figures – correct according to the biblical account where Adam and Eve only became ashamed of their bare bodies when they ate the forbidden fruit and were expelled from the Garden of Eden – were considered perfectly suitable by Queen Anne of Brittany in 1505, who commissioned the book as a gift for her five-year-old daughter, Claude. [
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| Adam and Eve before being uncovered. Photograph: Andrew Morris/The Fitzwilliam Museum, Image Li |
