Although many art critics were sure that paintings representing scenes from the Old Testament were in decline, the theme remained popular all throughout the second half of the 19th century. The genre nonetheless faced major challenges because traditional models were being toppled by archaeological discoveries in the Middle East, and the period was one of secularism in which science played an ever-increasing role in the reading of what Gustave Larroumet called «the darkest pages of the Bible». Painters who undertook to illustrate the Old Testament thus had to satisfy contradictory expectations because faithfulness to the texts clashed with new requirements for authenticity and for spectacularity, but works such as Fernand Cormon’s Caïn (1880) perhaps drew their originality (if not their modernity) from this audacious attempt to reconcile the words of the Bible with the injunctions of early Naturalism.