In 1949, when Master Botero was 16 years old, he was expelled from the Catholic school when his defense of Picasso's painting was repressed by the priest and principal of the institution as an act of apostasy, communism and atheism. That extreme and arbitrary notion of good and evil that was so common in the “Antioqueño” environment of the time would be his excuse for treating with irony and humor the very subject of religion.
Here the demonic presence of the serpent, which alludes to the evil described at the beginning of Genesis is completely subverted by a harmless snake that walks through an apple field.
Many years later, the same principal who had expelled him would be proud in the local press that Fernando Botero would have been one of the distinguished students that had ever studied at his school.