Dürer's engraving grew out of drawings begun around 1500, in which he tried to work out a system for the perfect male and perfect female body using measurement and geometric construction rather than observation from a single model ^[3]. The result was the first convincingly rendered contrapposto pose in German art ^[3]. Dürer had never been to Rome and could not have seen the Apollo Belvedere, excavated around 1479, in person; his knowledge of the statue came through drawings he acquired, probably close to his second visit to Venice around 1504 ^[2]. A surviving British Museum drawing inscribed Apolo shows him working out the figure directly from these secondhand sources, borrowing the legs from a Mantegna engraving and the torso from his understanding of the Belvedere statue ^[2]. He signed the finished engraving in full, in Latin, ALBERTVS DVRER NORICVS FACIEBAT 1504, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg made this in 1504 ^[1].

Dürer set Adam and Eve against a dark northern forest rather than an open classical landscape, with the pale, carefully modelled bodies standing out against the shade. In the foreground a cat lies beside a mouse, and an elk, ox, and rabbit rest nearby, apparently undisturbed by the presence of humans ^[1]. One influential reading, associated with the art historian Erwin Panofsky, holds that these four animals stand for the four medieval humoral temperaments, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine, thrown into disorder once the Fall brings sickness and death into the world ^[4]. This interpretation is not universally accepted among later scholars, and one modern edition of Dürer's work describes it as now almost unanimously rejected ^[4]. Whatever the precise symbolism, the tension between the resting cat and mouse in the foreground echoes the coming moment of temptation between Adam and Eve ^[3].

Contemporary and later critics have not always found the print immediately persuasive. The art historian E. H. Gombrich noted a slight artificiality in the figures' form, posture, and symmetrical composition when set beside Italian and classical models, an awkwardness he attributed to Dürer working in a visual language less native to him than his usual style ^[1]. Kenneth Clark took a similar view, judging the 1504 figures as close to the classical ideal as anything being produced in Italy at that date, before Dürer's later, more clearly Northern treatments of the same subject, including the 1507 Adam and Eve panels now in the Prado, moved away from that ideal again ^[2]. Both readings treat the engraving as a serious, if not fully resolved, attempt to import a foreign aesthetic rather than as a failure.