I can't remember seeing paintings where Adam, Eve and the snake are depicted in paradise and the snake still having its legs. Are there paintings like that?
I guess the snake must have depicted with legs in medieval paintings as it would be accurate.
Links to prominent paintings of that kind would be appreciated.
This one is definitely not an AI generated image because it is in an art book I have, which was published in 2008. Yes, computer manipulation may have started by then, but this massive volume has thousands of photos of original works of art, most of which which can be viewed in art galleries or cathedrals around the world.
It is by Hugo van der Goes, born in Ghent circa 1440, died near Brussels in 1482 and is one side of the Vienna diptych currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna). It is also called The Fall of Man and the Redemption.
In The Fall of Man there are medieval representations of Adam and Eve standing beside a tree with fruit on it. Leaning upright against the tree trunk is a hybrid serpent, looking more human than serpent, but definitely standing upright on legs, with a serpent-like 'tail' coming from it, dropping down to the grass where it is coiled. This is clearly a depiction of the serpent, still with legs.
I deal mainly with printed books and avoid computer pictures as much as possible, not least because of camera trickery and AI manipulations. The book to see it in is called Art - The Definitive Visual Guide, editorial consultant Andrew Graham-Dixon, published by Dorling Kindersley in 2008, and is on page 147. But you can see a picture at Wikimedia Commons.
Are there paintings with Adam and Eve in paradise with the snake with legs?
They are rare, but there exists a few.
In art history, there are numerous examples of paintings and sculptures that were inspired by religious texts. Amongst these, many depict a well-known theme from the Garden of Eden: the seduction of Eve. This dramatic biblical scene is described in the third chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Old Tes- tament. The animal that addresses Eve is referred to as serpent, or serpens in Latin1, and is supposed to represent the devil in disguise. In modern languages the word “serpent” is synonymous with “snake”. However – and this is note- worthy – the more general meaning of serpens is “reptile”, derived from the Latin verb serpere, meaning “to creep”, and thus equivalent to the word “reptile” itself2. Naturally, this obscures the true identity of the reptilian animal that is believed to have seduced Eve. The modern meaning of “serpent” has largely de- termined the way the animal has been depicted in art, as a snake. No matter how beautiful any particular work of art may be, from a biblical perspective such a picture is erroneous, as will be explained below. A well-known, excellent example is “The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man” (Fig. 1). It was painted around the year 1617 by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who was responsible for the human figures in it, and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), who drafted the flora and fauna. This magnificent piece of art is housed at the Mauritshuis (The Hague, the Netherlands). The painting depicts the moment just prior to the consumption of the forbidden fruit and the fall of man3. Apparently Brueghel was familiar with the majority of the animals he painted. For instance, the head and antlers of the male roe deer (Capreolus capreolus)4 are absolutely correct zoologically and therefore immediately recognisable as such. Even the snake, of- fering apples to Eve, can be identified unambiguously. In fact, it is a grass snake (Natrix natrix)5. The yellow collar behind the head, the typically green to brown colour of the body, the dark spots, and the typical hue of the ventral scales: all these characteristics are seen in Brueghel’s snake. However, Natrix natrix is not an arboreal species; probably the painter was not familiar with exotic, more “ap- propriate” taxa. There is yet another category of artwork dealing with the Seduction. Here, the serpent is some kind of a mythical diabolic animal with a snake-like body with front limbs. Occasionally, additional wings attached to the back are present.
The front limbs may have reptilian claws or may take the form of human arms (Fig. 2). It is no coincidence that in such “cases” female breasts are present and that these serpents have heads with faces mirroring Eve’s. The portrayal of the serpent head as a mirror image of Eve’s face was common in earlier iconography because women were identified as the source of the original sin6. Those works in which the serpent is represented as a tetrapod are even more interesting.
Invariably, in these cases, the hind limbs are reptilian in nature, while the front limbs may be either human or reptilian (Figs 3, 4). The serpent in “The Fall and Redemption of Man” by Hugo van der Goes (†1482) has a re- markably lizard- or crocodile-like body, with the exception of the head, which, again, shows Eve’s face mirrored (Fig. 4). Without a culturally determined mi- sogynistic iconography, the serpent could have been expected to be pictured as in the example of Figure 5. Only some artists – amongst whom were Hugo van der Goes and Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) – interpreted the third chapter of Genesis almost correctly, because, after all, the divine wrath evoked by the consumption of the forbidden fruit affected not only Adam and Eve, but also the serpent7, who was punished and lost its legs. Thus, before handing Eve the forbidden fruit the serpent must have had limbs. Now this is remarkable, since the first chapter of Genesis states that “... God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind...”8. The change in appearance of the serpent would thus seem to be a biblical contradiction or even a record of evolution.
As matters stand today, the evolution of snakes from tetrapod ancestors (par- ticularly with regard to the loss of legs) is well understood on the basis of data from the fossil record and discoveries in the field of molecular biology. The latter yielded the genetic blueprint and gene expression of the limbless and elongated vertebrate body form (Bauplan)9. Yet, even in the Ancient Middle East, where the third chapter of Genesis was written around 3,000 BP10, the view that the limbless snake was “exceptional” as compared to lizards, and monitors in parti- cular, could easily have arisen. Furthermore, similarities amongst all these squa- mate reptiles (that is, possessing a bifurcated tongue and a skin with scales) could have led to the assumption that snakes once had legs. For a long time, only fossil snakes similar to extant species had been known11. However, at least since the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus “On the Origin of Species”, it was possible for the concept of a tetrapod snake ancestor to emerge. A notable clue in this respect is the fact that in boas and pythons vestiges of hind limbs appear externally as cloacal spurs, and pelvic remnants are found in the trunk musculature. - On the Lost Legs of the Snake that Seduced Eve
Figure 3. Detail of the left inner wing of the triptych “The Last Judgement” by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria). Adam and Eve are tempted into eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge by a half-human/half-reptilian creature, with its face mirrored on Eve’s.
