Forbidden fruit Adam and Eve upon expelling them from the Garden. "By that with which they were made low were they rectified." Since the fig is a long-standing symbol of female sexuality, it enjoyed a run as a favorite understudy to the apple as the forbidden fruit during the Italian Renaissance. The most famous depiction of the fig as the forbidden fruit was painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti in his masterpiece fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Proponents of the theory that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in what is now known as the Middle East suggest that the fruit was
Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio) Life with Fruit" (c. 1603), a painting which John Spike identifies as "the source of all subsequent Roman still-life paintings." Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio) Basket of Fruit (c.1599) is a still life painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), which hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosian Library), Milan. It shows a wicker basket perched on the edge of a ledge. The basket contains a selection of summer fruit: ... a good-sized, light-red peach attached to a stem with wormholes in the leaf resembling damage by oriental fruit moth (Orthosia hibisci). Beneath it is a single bicolored