1. Death of Adam (detail)

Adam dispatches his son Seth to the gates of paradise. There he is to ask for the oil of mercy, with which to salve his fathers’s body and make him well. Instead of the oil, the archangel Michael gives Seth the seeds of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, with the prophecy that Adam will only recover once the tree grown from these seeds bears fruit. From this seeds would grow the tree that was to provide the wood for building the CrossThis scene is included in the middle distance of the larger one, where we see the tiny figures of Seth and the archangel.