Leaf from a Book of Hours: Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man (Prefatory Miniature to the Office of the Virgin) (recto) and Text with Illustrated Border (verso) (1 of 3 Excised Leaves) (c. 1510): Art, H

Leaf from a Book of Hours: Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man (Prefatory Miniature to the Office of the Virgin) (recto) and Text with Illustrated Border (verso) (1 of 3 Excised Leaves) (c. 1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This leaf came from a highly customized and lavish book of hours made in Rouen, a major center for book production at the time. Intended for a female patron, the book, of which the museum owns three leaves, contained numerous illuminations. Shown here are Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, just before disobeying God by eating fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, considered the first sin in Christianity. This precedes the Hours of the Virgin’s traditional first scene of the Annunciation. Its inclusion emphasizes a need for redemption through recitation of the subsequent prayers.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man (Prefatory Miniature to the Office of the Virgin) (recto) and Text with Illustrated Border (verso) (1 of 3 Excised Leaves)
• Date: c. 1510
• Culture: France, Rouen
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and liquid gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Each leaf: 17.9 x 12.8 cm (7 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2001.79

A detail from the museum

This image opens to what is the heart of every book of hours, the Hours of the Virgin, a set of prayers in which the reader asked the Virgin Mary to intercede on their behalf.

Collection credit

The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sotheby's (Firm). Highly Important Illuminated Manuscripts. 1981.
• Fliegel, Stephen N. The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection of Manuscript Illuminations. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.