Diptyque de Vienne

These two small panels were made to be seen together, around 1480, by the Flemish master Hugo van der Goes, and read as a single argument. On the left is the Fall of Man, Adam and Eve in the garden with the serpent, the moment everything goes wrong. On the right is the Lamentation, the dead Christ mourned after the Cross, the moment it is put right. Sin on one side, redemption on the other, hinged together so your eye crosses from one to the other. It is a rare pairing for a diptych of this kind. At some point the two halves were separated and no one remembered they belonged together. They were not shown as a pair again, and reattributed to van der Goes, until the 1880s.