In his 1793 painting, The Creation of Eve, Henry Fuseli flirted with theological controversy by including the head and shoulders of a statuesque male figure illuminated by a radiant, halo-like aura above a supine Adam and a supplicating Eve. Part of a series of paintings illustrating Milton's Paradise Lost that formed the basis of Fuseli's Milton gallery, The Creation of Eve plays on the representational ambiguities of its source in depicting divine agency. Milton destabilizes the biblical formulation of divine agency by establishing a celestial hierarchy that devolves creative power from the Father to the Son. This hierarchy is complicated by Milton's inclusion of two contrasting ac counts of Eve's creation and her creator. In book 7, Raphael paraphrases Genesis 1:27–8, ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he them’, to identify the Father as the creator of both Adam and Eve. In the following book, Adam's version of Eve's creation follows Genesis 2:21, ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs’, to identify the Son as Eve's creator. While Fuseli's statuesque deity was intended to invoke ‘the shape / Still glorious’ that plucked out Adam's rib to form Eve, some viewers of the painting found this treatment of divine agency troubling. Fuseli's patron, William Roscoe, for example, opposed the inclusion of the statuesque deity.