Marriage of Adam and Eve (1555): Art, History and Details

Marriage of Adam and Eve (1555) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Duvet (French, 1485–1561).

The work and its context

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

Jean Duvet, a metalworker from Dijon in eastern France, served as the royal goldsmith to Kings Francois I and Henri II of France. He may have traveled to Italy in the 1510s but mostly remained isolated from other engravers. Accordingly, he borrowed heavily from engravings he must have owned, developing an eccentric, ornamental style with crowded compositions that ignore logical space. Here, he adapted Adam from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of Adam and Eve, creating a scene of the marriage of Adam and Eve, the first humans in the biblical book of Genesis, before God and angels.

Object facts

• Title: Marriage of Adam and Eve
• Date: 1555
• Creator attribution: Jean Duvet (French, 1485–1561)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1953.213.4

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

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.