World-changing yet unnoticed

For obvious reasons, I take a certain interest in other people’s takes on the Eden myth, and my eye was caught by a newspaper story about this painting ‘The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man’, painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in 1613.

What strikes me as brilliant about this beautiful image is the way that Adam and Eve, on the point of committing Original Sin, are tiny figures in the background who you’d barely notice if their significance hadn’t been signalled by the painting’s title.  I think this is a beautiful touch, because that’s how life is.  Significant events, events whose consequences will be felt for decades, centuries, millenia afterwards, don’t come labelled as such, and may look at the time like little things, hardly worth noticing at all.  (Which links with a previous post here.)