Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/392

378 when they are driven out of Paradise: and here the attitudes of the figures express the first effects of their sin; they are made aware of their nakedness, which they seek to conceal. We finally see them receive their punishment, being compelled by the angel to depart from Paradise.

In the second compartment are Adam and Eve, with their two little children, Cain and Abel. These last are also shown when Abel is offering the best of his flock in sacrifice, while Cain presents the less worthy oblation. The expression of the latter displays his envy of his brother—that of Abel makes manifest the love he bears to God. One part of this picture is of singular beauty: it exhibits Cain ploughing the earth with a pair of oxen, whose labour, and the efforts they make beneath the yoke, are so admirably exhibited, that they seem alive and in positive motion. The same maybe said of the figure of Abel, who is keeping his flocks: he is then slain by his brother, and here the movements of Cain are full of violence; his expression is that of pitiless cruelty, as he strikes his brother with his club, while the bronze itself has been made to exhibit the languor of death in the most beautiful form of Abel. In the distance, moreover, and executed in basso-rilievo, is seen the Almighty Father, demanding from Cain what he has done with his brother. Each of the compartments comprise four stories. In the third Lorenzo represented the patriarch Noah issuing from the ark, with his wife, his sons, his daughters, and the wives of his sons, together with all the animals, those of the air as well as of the earth: all these creatures are finished with such perfection of excellence, each in its kind, that it is not possible for art more effectually to imitate nature. The open ark is seen in the extreme distance, with the desolation caused by the deluge: this part is in perspective and in the lowest relief (bassissimo-rilievo), the whole being treated with the utmost delicacy: the figures of Noah and his sons could not possibly be more full of life, as they offer their sacrifice to God, while the rainbow, the sign of peace between God and Noah, is seen in the heavens. But much the most admirable of all is the scene when Noah has planted the vine, and having drunk of the fruit thereof has become inebriated, and is exposed to the derision of Ham, his son. And of a truth no sleeping figure could be more exactly imitated, the utter abandonment