Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

191. MS M.917/945, f. 150v–p. 75


The Dying Adam Dispatching Seth to Paradise

ca. 1440
The Netherlands, Utrecht
MS M.917/945, f. 150v–p. 75

Purchased on the Belle da Costa Greene Fund with the assistance of the Fellows and with special assistance of Mrs. Frederick B. Adams, Sr., Mrs. Robert Charles, Mr. Laurens M. Hamilton, The Heineman Foundation, Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mrs. Jacob M. Kaplan

The rare Friday Hours of the Compassion of God plus the Mass of the Holy Cross are illustrated with a series of nine images, all of which are exhibited here. (Two introductory large miniatures for the Hours and the Mass are missing.) The iconography of the medieval legend of the True Cross offers an imaginative link—physical and metaphysical—between Adam and Christ and between terrestrial and celestial Paradise. The cycle begins with a remorseful Adam, on his deathbed, sending his third son, Seth, to the Garden of Eden to fetch a branch of the Tree of Mercy.