The Getty Museum is hosting six visitors from Canterbury Cathedral this fall: a series of life-size stained-glass panels dating back to 1190.
The visitors include the ark-builder Noah, Abraham’s father Thara and Enoch’s father Jared, as well as the Three Magi.
The Ancestors of Christ windows, of which they are part, were the handiwork of the "Methuselah Master," who also created a similar window depicting the Biblical Methuselah, the longest-lived man in the Hebrew Bible.
The six windows are on loan for a display that opens this week and runs through February 2, 2014.
The windows were temporarily removed from Canterbury Cathedral to allow repairs to the surrounding brick, and are traveling overseas for the first time.
Canterbury Cathedral Dean Robert Willis noted at the opening ceremony that the windows were completed less than a decade before the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on Dec. 29, 1170.
Willlis noted that more than a million visitors come to Canterbury each year; many seminarians and clergy stay in a unique lodge built on the site of structures destroyed in the World War II Baedeker Blitz, when men with shovels saved the cathedral by lobbing explosives of its roof.
In addition the windows, the "Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures of Church and Cloister" exhibit includes illuminated pages from the St. Alban’s psalter, on loan from the Cathedral Library in Hildesheim, Germany.
