ABSTRACT
Cornelis van Haarlem’s mannerist masterpiece, Adam and Eve in Paradise (1592, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Fig. 11.1 ), presents the fall of humankind within a setting that is remarkable for its zoological display. Innocently naked beneath the tree of good and evil, tempted by a quasi-humanoid serpent that hangs down from a branch to offer a piece of fruit to Eve, she and Adam stand amid what I elsewhere describe as a menagerie of evil, 1 an assemblage of other animals of various species, each of which bears some symbolic association with evil: a dog, a lion, a bear, an owl, a monkey, a cat, several frogs and, of sole interest to us here, a fox. While all these other creatures with the exception of the frogs gaze outwardly from the scene toward the viewer, the fox is distinguished as the only one that stares back at an object within the scene itself. Specifically the fox is craning its neck to look up at the serpent in the tree in a manner perhaps suggestive of complicity on the fox’s part in the serpent’s wicked deed-in-progress.
