This right leaf of a diptych, showing the Crucifixion, is probably made in France in about 1360-1390. The left wing of the diptych, showing the Adoration of the Magi, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Although little is known of the provenance of the present leaf, the Ashmolean plaque is extremely well documented: it had probably entered the Tradescant collection in Lambeth by 1656, although it was first described as part of the Ashmolean collection in 1685. This means that the leaves were bound together - and then separated - before the middle of the seventeenth century, and that the diptych had probably been in England since the Middle Ages. Although an English place of production cannot be ruled out, the diptych is more likely to be French or even German.

The devotional diptych is in many ways the object type most associated with the notion of Gothic ivory carving. The earliest examples probably date to the 1240s; these are complex, large and ambitious works that emerged, somewhat surprisingly, with no obvious precursors. The owners of ivory diptychs sometimes appear within their images. Such portraits indicate that they were special requests on the part of their commissioners, and they parallel the similar figures that appear in manuscripts and panel paintings of the period. The iconography of Gothic diptychs oscillated between two poles. The first of which is the desire to present narratives (Life of Christ and Virgin Mary) for envisaging. The second was the use of non-narrative images to form the focus of devotion.