Expulsion from Paradise

Benvenuto di Giovanni's Expulsion from Paradise depicts Adam and Eve driven from Eden by the archangel Michael, a narrative subject that was becoming increasingly common in Sienese and Florentine panel painting as the Old Testament cycle of human origins gained favor as devotional subject matter in the late 15th century. The Expulsion had been monumentalized in Florence by Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel fresco, and Benvenuto's panel version necessarily engages with that influential precedent, though his Sienese sensibility transforms the anguished physicality of Masaccio's figures into something more decorative and formally contained.

The Expulsion composition organizes three figures — Adam, Eve, and the angel — in a tight group before the Paradise gate, requiring Benvenuto to manage the spatial and dramatic relationship between the divine command and the human response. His handling of the figures' nudity is modest and slightly formalized, the bodies covered by the narrative convention of covering hands even as they leave the garden.