Pinacoteca art gallery, Room XVI: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was painted by Wenzel Peter

Wenzel Peter (Karlsbad 1745 - Rome 1829), is an Austrian artist, who specialized in painting animals. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, cat. 41266, is a painting of oil on canvas, measures 336 x 247 centimeter, and is displayed in Pinacoteca section of the Vatican Museum. It is very vivid in colors, and attention to details is mesmerizing.

The large canvas represents the climax of Wenzel Peter's career. He was an animalist painter, that is to say specialized in a very unique type of painting, and this led him to reproducing with extraordinary naturalism animals of the most varied species, as it were "photographed" in both standing and fighting positions. The Garden of Eden is the proof of the highest virtuosity, since the artist gathers around the figures of Adam and Eve those of over two hundred animals from all over the world, reproduced not only with pictorial ability, but also with a detailed knowledge and scientific precision. In 1831 Gregory XVI (pontiff from 1831 to 1846) purchased twenty works of the Austrian painter Wenzel Peter to furnish the Room of the Consistory in the Papal State Apartment.