Getty Presents Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages, an exhibition that explores how the Biblical story of Creation was visualized, represented, and interpreted in the Middle Ages and today.

On view at the Getty Center from January 27 through April 19, 2026, the exhibition features 15 manuscripts from the Getty Museum’s collection alongside four contemporary paintings by LA-based artist Harmonia Rosales.

“The biblical story of Creation formed the basis of how medieval Christians viewed the world and continues to exert a strong influence on many artists today, seeing it both as an etiological origin story and as a metaphor for the human condition,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “Alongside contemporary works by Harmonia Rosales, the Museum objects in the exhibition explore traditional and divergent interpretations of Creation, challenging and reframing medieval works of art in the process.”

The exhibition will address numerous themes, including Visualizing the Creation, Creation in the Abrahamic Faiths, The Introduction of Evil, and Beginnings and Ends, along with a special section devoted to Adam and Eve.

The works featured in the section on Adam and Eve will explore the creation story of the first humans and how its iconic imagery encoded complex ideas about gender roles and human behavior. Eve’s role in the Creation story cemented the medieval concept of feminine weakness and generated some of the most recognizable medieval images that display sociocultural beliefs about gender. On view will be Creation of Eve from a recently acquired manuscript where the artist, Étienne Colaud, depicts God creating Eve from Adam’s rib, intending for her to be Adam’s “helper,” contributing to the medieval understanding of women as fundamentally lesser than and secondary to men.

This section will also put medieval artworks in dialogue with contemporary works that comment on, reinterpret, and subvert expectations of the well-known narrative and its iconic visual history. Rosales’s Portrait of Eve recasts the traditional Christian Eve as a figure from West African Yoruba mythology and depicts Eve in profile within a large circular ori, a decorated halo-like shape symbolizing one’s destiny and spiritual transformation. The images in golden roundels that surround Eve describe the cycle of life and encompass her own experience, as well as the tribulations of her descendants in America. With her eyes closed, Eve bears the weight of the suffering of her people and becomes a symbol for interrupting cycles of trauma.

“I approach my paintings as a way to reclaim stories long erased, using Yoruba cosmology to restore strength and presence to figures often left out of history,” says Harmonia Rosales. “In dialogue with Getty’s medieval manuscripts, my work bridges past and present, exploring resilience, identity, and what it means to envision the world’s beginnings through a lineage that has always existed.”

The artworks in the Visualizing the Creation section provide a case study of how medieval artists made concrete the abstract concepts of the seven days of creation for their audiences. Featured is The Creation of the World, which depicts God presiding from above, holding a disc with circles containing the days of the Creation in clockwise fashion, with the creation of Eve highlighted in the center. Inscriptions from Genesis surround each roundel, describing the events of each day, with graphic shapes and brilliant colors capturing the drama of the events unfolding.

Creation in the Abrahamic Faiths showcases the Creation story in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions in order to underscore the story’s shared nature between the three religions that recognize the figure of Abraham as their first prophet. While all three rely on the same central narrative, each approached the account differently. Highlighted in this section will be pages from the Rothschild Pentateuch, a French Historical Bible, and The Wonders of Creation, a popular text throughout the medieval Islamic world focused on God’s works in the celestial realm.

The Introduction of Evil section examines the narrative of how God gave humans and angels the capacity to choose between good and evil, and how this free will was the cause of the world’s corruption. Medieval Christians believed that evil was not a creation of God but rather a consequence of human choice. Included in this section is the first confrontation between good and evil, known as The Fall of the Rebel Angels, where Lucifer and the other rebel angels are seen being expelled from heaven and thrown into the flaming mouth of a terrifying beast representing Hell.

Beginnings and Ends focuses on the events described in the first and last book of the Christian Bible, which narrates the world’s creation and eventual demise, described as a period of destruction and anguish preceding the second coming of Christ. Medieval artists depicted the catastrophic events at the end of the world vividly in their work, exemplified in The Fourteenth Sign Before the Day of Judgment. Intense wind and flames express the chaos that will take place on heaven and on earth before God’s ultimate judgment of humanity.

Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages is curated by Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum, and Larisa Grollemond, associate curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum.

To complement the exhibition, curators Elizabeth Morrison and Larisa Grollemond will be in conversation with Harmonia Rosales at the Getty Center and online on Zoom on March 1, 2026.