The scene portrays Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise, surrounded by domestic animals, birds and mammals. All the garden of delights is in full flower and shot through with flashes of light. In the landscape seen in the distance, a scene well-known to the painter has been identified: Monte Grappa and the south-western zone of Bassano, between San Fortunato and the Lazzaretto, separated from Paradise by a flat and grassy glade.

The suggestiveness of the work depends on the restless touches of light and on the dense and welling toning of the greens. The rustic serenity of the place, depicted with the humble and everyday vision typical of Bassano, is undermined only by the minuscule presence of the lizard, symbol of “vanitas” and corruption, lying in ambush even in the bucolic life of Eden.

The autonomous spaciousness of the landscape and the clear and realistic vision of the animals stands out for its intense innovative character; this only finds a persuasive parallel in the contemporary Nordic works of Jan “Velvet” Bruegel.

The two figures of Adam and Eve are generally assigned to the hand of Jacopo, on account, partly, of the existence of a drawing of this group preserved in Berlin. As for the lush landscape and the group of animals on the right, opinions have swung between Leandro and Francesco, with the latter being the more favoured.

The picture has been dated variously, to a period around 1568, or else, more recently, to the period 1570-76. It is a period, however, in which Francesco begins working more intensely in the studio of his father, developing those rustic and bucolic compositions on Biblical themes which were to prove a profitable repertoire for the Bassano circle for years to come.

The Pamphilj collection, judging by the seventeenth-century inventories, possessed a certain number of paintings by Jacopo and Francesco Bassano; there are listed several of these pictures with “Biblical-pastoral” settings, which the Bassano studio produced in great quantities from the 1570s and 1580s onwards.