Representations of the Garden of Eden in christian sacred architecture

Abstract

According to the Bible, the path of humanity began in a garden, an enclosed precinct, a hideaway, a shelter, simultaneously a place of genesis and death. In the architecture of the Christian churches, Heaven, or Paradise, is often represented as a garden with lush and spontaneous vegetation within which dominates the Tree of Knowledge. The Garden of Eden is thus a place of the reconstruction of the man, the centre of the soul. This study aims to analyse the visual representations of the Garden of Eden in the decorative arts of the Christian worship space.