This drawing can be included in the range of Luigi Ademollo's early graphics for two reasons: the subject, which was repeated several times, and the style, which highlights the soft and accurate purism of the early 19th century.

The sheet presented here offers a delicate view of Ademollo's aesthetics in a sacred key, illustrating Adam and Eve captured in the moment of the rebuke received from God the Father and followed by the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  The episode is part of the Old Testament from Genesis (3, 1-24).

The drawing is arranged vertically and across the entire field; traces of graphite can be observed with subsequent reworking in brown ink and watercolour in shades of brown and ochre, especially in the left area of ​​the tree background behind the characters. There are also white lead elevations along the contours of the musculature of the bodies.

The iconography shows us the scene with the ancestors still in Eden in the foreground on the left side emerging behind the woodland setting, depicted by the trunks and branches, as a reference to the Tree of Knowledge, from which Eve, deceived by the serpent, will taste the apple. On the right side, an atmosphere immersed in supernatural vapours envelops the amorphous divine representation of Jehovah that the artist symbolically depicts with a bearded male head.

With the arrival of Ademollo in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and his commissioning, starting from 1788-1789, for the decoration of the Pergola theatre in Florence, his most important commissions began, between the 18th and early 19th centuries, also in the noble and ecclesiastical spheres. Among the first pictorial cycles were the grand-ducal ones for the Lorena family in the Palatine Chapel (1791-1793), noble and clerical ones in Siena and finally, the Marian and Christological cycle painted from 1801 in the cathedral of San Donato in Arezzo, among whose subjects a scene of the Expulsion from Paradise recalls the sheet presented here, so it is possible to hypothesize its use as a preparatory drawing for the Arezzo iconographic program or a similar decorative project of larger format.

In the iconography of the sheet presented here the characters of Adam, Eve and God the Father refer to those elegant and refined inventive outcomes that the young Luigi juggled, depending on the narrated subject, in an intimate dimension or with choral narrative emphasis. 

Egle Radogna

Luigi Ademollo

Milan, 1764 – Florence, 1849

         Luigi Ademollo, born in Milan in 1764, was one of the major exponents of Italian Neoclassicism. He began his artistic studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, working as the apprentice of Giuliano Traballesi, Giuseppe Piermarini, Giocondo Albertolli and Domenico Aspari, who were all great exponents of Milan artistic culture.

          He soon abandoned his academic studies and visited many Italian cities to paint theatrical set design. In 1785 he reached Rome, which at the time was the undisputable European capital of arts and temple of the “Vero Gusto”. He stayed in Rome until 1788 where he was in contact with the more eccentric circles of the artistic Roman culture, such as the “Accademia de’ Pensieri”, under Felice Giani’s direction from 1787 to 1793, where artists such as Luigi Sabatelli, Pietro Benvenuti and Giuseppe Bossi received their education. Such academy was famous for the experimentation of the figurative language linked to the sublime inspiration, and to the literary connotation of neoclassicism as well as to primordial instances, which were already being diffused by Nordic artists.

          In Rome the genius and productive talent of Ademollo assumed that particular and distinctive touch linked to a literary-philosophic vision of neoclassicism.       

          In 1788 he finally moved to Tuscany, as he had won the contest for the decoration of the Florentine theater of the Pergola, which was completed in 1789. During the same year he was nominated ‘consociate’ of the prestigious Academy of the Fine Arts of Florence. Since then, other than short stays in Rome, he lived permanently in Tuscany.

Ademollo was a very productive painter inspired by a visionary vein fostered by a great literary culture founded on the classics (the Holy Scripture, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch): he gained immense fame for having strikingly decorated numerous public buildings and private Tuscan residences. To date, there is still not a complete and exhaustive list of which works of Ademollo still exist and are being conserved.

His artistic production includes mural paintings (frescoes, tempera, encaustic paintings), oils on canvas, temperas and watercolors on paper, sketches and inscriptions.