 Well, good evening everyone. Thank you Carrie for that introduction and to Scott and the whole alumni relations office for this wonderful invitation to spend some time virtually with other alumni tonight talking about this fantastic exhibition. As Scott mentioned I myself from a Fairfield University alumna. And this is very much an alumni and current student produced exhibition. So as Carrie said, if you have not had the chance to visit the Bellarmine Hall galleries. You only have until December 17 to get there and see this show. And I will be walking you through it exactly as I would if you were coming for a tour in the galleries. And I think Carrie mentioned our last public tour on a Saturday is December 10 so come at noon. If you want something a little bit more interactive and then we're going to be talking about here tonight. But you are welcome to drop any questions you have in the chat as I'm going forward. So this is what you would see when you walk right into the Bellarmine Hall galleries and I included this view instead of the one that sort of begins with the title of the exhibition, because of the picture that you see on the left. And this is the individual that is the reason why this exhibition is here at Fairfield University, that is a photograph of Samuel H. Cress. And on the right you can't really read it and make it out but there's a panel about the Sam Cress and the Samuel H. Cress Foundation, which have been incredible supporters of the museum since it opened in 2010. And even in some cases a little bit before, because before there ever was a museum at Fairfield, there was a Cress collection of paintings at Fairfield University. There was a group of 10 European paintings from the 13th through 19th centuries that came to Fairfield thanks to the intercession of one Dr. Philip Eliasoff. And some among you may know Philip who has been teaching at Fairfield for 47 years and taught me art history as an incoming first year student way back in 2003. Sam Cress was a early 20th century businessman. He founded a chain of five and dime stores. They're called Cress stores. So some of you, if you are of a certain age, may remember the Cress chain of stores. They are distinct from the Cresci chain. So you have to imagine early 20th century, two chains, very similar names. Samuel H. Cress set himself apart by devoting his fortune not only to buying an immense amount of European art, especially Italian Renaissance art of the 15th and 16th centuries, but it was what he did with his collection. He donated much of it to founding the National Gallery, our National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1939, kind of to help them out because when the National Gallery was opening as the brainchild of Andrew Mellon, they did not have enough artwork to fill the extraordinary building that they were creating on the National Mall. So they turned to Samuel H. Cress knowing he was living in New York with this fabulous collection in his apartment, and he gave the National Gallery a wonderful selection of his collection. But he did something even more unusual, and that was carve up a collection that ultimately amounted to more than 3000 artworks, mostly paintings with some sculptures and metals. He carved his collection up, and he distributed it across the United States through not only himself, but through the foundation that he established in 1929. And what I mean by sent it out across the United States, they gave parcels of artwork to regional museums around the United States and places like Kansas and New Mexico, and they also gave small groupings of paintings to colleges and universities across the US. And the goal that the Cress Foundation had that Sam Cress believed in was that all Americans should have first person access to high quality works of art. And they should, especially if they were college and university students, and they should have that access, even if they did not live on East Coast, have easy access to New York or to Boston. So today, the Cress collection is spread in 90 different institutions across 33 states. So it's an extraordinarily disparate collection, and Fairfield is lucky to have just a small piece of that. So that is where I'm moving forward now to where we would actually begin our tour underneath the name of the exhibition that you can see there out of the Cress vaults women and sacred Renaissance painting. The idea for a Cress exhibition at Fairfield emerged from these 10 paintings that have been at Fairfield since the museum opened in 2010. And our desire to change them up a little bit. We thought wouldn't it be nice these paintings you know we've seen them for quite a long time. Wouldn't it be great if we could borrow some paintings from other Cress collections around the United States and sort of reinvigorate what we are seeing in the Bellarmine Hall galleries. So that was where we started. And then I had asked Kerry, who you just saw on screen a moment ago, I had asked Kerry if it would be okay if we involved Fairfield undergraduate students in coming up with this idea for a show. And Kerry was supportive of this idea from the start. And so was the director of the Samuel H. Cress Foundation, who is a fellow named Max Marmer. He could not have been more delighted that we were proposing to get Fairfield students involved in every aspect of what goes into creating a museum exhibition starting from the very idea of what exhibition is it going to be. So I want you to let you know that the exhibition that is on view right now. Kerry and I did not decide on the theme and the objects ahead of time and sort of impose it on our student co curators who were seven students who joined my seminar in spring of 2021. If you visit the exhibition or take our virtual tour you will see their names and their years of graduation on a panel that if we were standing in the gallery would be immediately to our left. And we're really letting them help us decide. And we're really only able to do that, thanks to the participation of the Cress Foundation, because they gave us a access to a very unsexy Excel spreadsheet that had about 3,300 rows on it. And every row represented one crest object, one painting, one sculpture, and all of the columns had the bits of information that you would find on a museum wall label, you know what artists painted it, what is the title, what country did it come from, what year was it made, is it oil, is it tempera. But it also had information like for example, how big is it. So we're starting at a part of the exhibition you'll notice that these are not, even though there's no one standing next to them for scale. If you've been in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries you know that they're not large. So these are relatively modestly sized paintings. We do not have a loading dock at our museum, we have one door in and one door out the same door you walk in is the same door the art gets wheeled in. The dimensions column on this spreadsheet was really important, because we couldn't ask to borrow any crest objects that could not fit into the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. So that was the first of many constraints that my students had to confront. There was also the question of conservation status. Another column on the spreadsheet that recorded is this object, painting, sculpture, metal. Is it in a good physical state? Can it be lent from whatever institution currently owns it to Fairfield? And if it was marked that it was too fragile, there was no point even asking, even asking for consideration. And another very helpful row on that spreadsheet asked if it was in storage or on view in its home institution. And that turned out to be one of the sort of angles that we as a class and as co-curators took in developing this exhibition. And you'll see that the first part of our show's title is Out of the Crest Vaults. Now the name Crests of course, because all of these objects belonged either to Sam Crests or to the foundation that he set up to distribute his collection across the United States. But vaults is just a very nice way of saying basement or saying storage. Because we thought as we, as a small academic art museum, petition larger museums like the National Gallery of Art to lend us their Crests objects, we thought wouldn't it be helpful if we could say, well, you know, we happen to know that you're not using this right now. We happen to know it's in the basement. It also happens that when museums accepted gifts from the Crests Foundation, they signed a deed of gift that specified they would keep those Crests paintings on view in perpetuity. So we kind of had a little bit of an angle is like, you know, we know you're not actually holding up your end of that bargain. You could lend them to Fairfield and sort of let them fulfill their intended purpose in our galleries. So that was where the idea for the exhibition came from the seminar students had to grapple with this extraordinary range of objects and by the midpoint of that spring 2021 semester, each one of them had to look at the Crests paintings that we owned, the Fairfield University Art Museum, and look at the spreadsheet and look at what was possible. And there were many other constraints we were asking them to consider like focusing mostly on museums on the East Coast, trying to keep down the cost of shipping, which is the single most highest cost in an exhibition like this. And then they had to propose a theme, a topic, an idea. And they varied. There was no single proposal that we adopted wholesale, but unsurprisingly for a group of paintings that we owned that were European from the 13th to 19th century. A number of them were Christian in subject. And so it emerged that several of the proposals were of images of the Virgin Mary. We had images of suggestion of images of the Holy Family, so the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus. And from that we decided to give the show the theme that you see on the wall women in sacred Renaissance painting. So focusing on Christian art in European Italian Renaissance art mostly with El Greco as our sole outlier who is non Italian, and really thinking about women in those paintings so not just the Virgin Mary, although we are standing in the part of the exhibition that really features the Virgin Mary. And also saints, female saints, martyrs, and also nuns. I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on. So I said that I wanted to sort of walk you through this as I would if we were standing together in the Bellarmine Hall galleries. And this is in fact, as I said, where we start the tours. And in no small part, because especially when it's current Fairfield students, it's fun to sort of try to get them thinking about what unites the objects in this part of the show. You know, we don't expect anyone who walks into the museum to have a background in Christianity, even though they may have been studying at a Jesuit institution or have graduated from one. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are Christian or they have a familiarity with these themes. But even if you have no idea what you're walking up to or walking toward, you could certainly make a connection that in all of these five paintings that we are looking at, one of which belongs to Fairfield and four, which wouldn't borrow from other institutions, that there is a repeated theme of the lady with the baby. And sometimes the lady has her head covered and sometimes she has a halo and sometimes she does not. And sometimes she's accompanied by a few other people like in this one. This is usually the painting that I start with. It's immediately to the left in the slide that I was just showing you. And Carrie and I both agree this has become our favorite. I think of the paintings that is in the show. And I decided in setting up tonight's slideshow that I would not put the captions for all of the objects on screen. I decided to just let it be the object. You have many ways if you would like to see the full caption information for all of these objects. If you visit our website that I dropped into the chat, you can download our exhibition catalog. You can do the virtual tour and the caption information for every object will be on there. But for this, I'm just going to let the images sort of, well, I won't say speak for themselves because I'm certainly talking for them. But this is a painting that is attributed to a follower of Giovanni Bellini, who is one of the most famous artists of Renaissance Venice. When we say follower of, we mean someone who's working in the style of a well-known artist. And it's always amusing to me to point to, if you can make out the very bottom of this image, there's a little parapet on which we have baby Jesus standing. And there is a signature there. And the signature, which is done in sort of a Latin style, is a signature attributing this painting directly to Giovanni Bellini. But it's a fake. Or we shouldn't say it's a fake. It's a knockoff. It's a Renaissance knockoff. It is not actually painted by the hand of Giovanni Bellini. But that didn't matter to the person who bought this around the year 1500. What they wanted was an example of this very iconic, famous style of art object that Bellini helped popularize and all five of those objects in that area of the show represent sort of spin-offs of. Because the reason we put these five objects together is because they represent the most common kind of art object being made in the Italian Renaissance. We call it a half-length virgin and child, half-length referring to how much of the Virgin Mary's body we can see. And sometimes the Virgin Mary is accompanied by saints. In this case, we have two saints behind them. And it's a lot of fun walking visitors through a painting like this. Not least because that saint on the right is definitely giving us, well you can fill in an adjective, but she's giving us some sort of look, right? She is engaging with us when even the Virgin Mary's eyes are just slightly off to the side. And it's interesting to invite visitors, students to consider the kind of environment these paintings were made for and what the paintings and the artists who made them are expecting from us as viewers. Because as I said, in 2022, you may well walk up to paintings like these and not have a great deal of context for what stories or individuals they are representing. But in the time that they were made, the expectation would be that, ah, we recognize Mary, we recognize the infant Jesus. We see an older man in the back left and we see that he has an old-fashioned key in his hands and we are able to instantly connect him to Saint Peter. Because that is the symbolizing the keys of the kingdom that Jesus gave him. So it all depends on the context you bring to the object. But it's worth sort of inviting yourself to step back in time to a period around the year 1500 and imagine ourselves in Italy. Imagine ourselves walking into a well-appointed Renaissance home, let's say in Florence or in Venice, where you would see an object like this on the wall. And I wouldn't even have to be that well-appointed of a house in Renaissance Venice or Florence because we know that objects like these were immensely popular and they were popular along all social classes. That's something that's especially easy to track in a city like Florence. This painting is from Venice, but Florence in particular, where there's an extraordinary wealth of inventories of people's homes from the very wealthy to the very limited means that survive of all of their worldly goods, organized room by room, hundreds of thousands of these inventories. And what historians and art historians have learned in studying them is that no matter how much money you had, one thing you wanted to have at home was an image of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. So if you were very wealthy, you were buying a painting directly from Giovanni Bellini himself. If you didn't have quite that much money, perhaps you'd be buying a painting like the one on screen, not by Bellini, but by someone who was very credibly imitating his style. Or you might be buying a painting like the one you see there on the right. Well, you see two paintings at the left side of the screen. The leftmost painting is one that belongs to Fairfield University. It's one that lives here permanently. To its right, you're seeing a painting that came from Miami by an artist named Lorenzo di Crade. We don't know his name. It's not so widely known among non-specialists today. But in Florence in the 15th century, he trained alongside Leonardo da Vinci in the same workshop. So he was a very well known artist. If you have a lot of money, you're getting a Lorenzo di Crade to hang in your house, which the question is for what purpose? Art historians, we are always interested first and foremost in objects. That's why we're art historians and not historians and the stories that they can tell us, the questions that we can ask of them. And one of the questions you can always ask of an art object that required some investment of resources is why did this thing ever come into being? Why was it bought? What did someone use it for? And on one level, art objects were used then as they might be used by collectors now as a demonstration of status, as a demonstration of refined taste. But in this time and place, objects like this had a very defined scope of purpose that was about religion. And I always invite students to really think about sort of a brain teaser. If you were a Christian living in Florence around the year 1500, how would you know the stories of the religion in which you had been raised? How would you learn about it? And often someone will say, well, you know, read the Bible. Like, well, could you actually do that if the year is 1500? Could you actually access a copy of the New Testament, open it and read it in a language that would make sense to you? And for most people walking around Italy at this time, that answer was no. On a basic level, most people were a large proportion, I should say. People were not literate. Women almost exclusively were not literate. Those who were literate tended to be literate in their spoken vernacular language of Italian. But the Bible was only available in Latin. So that meant that the way you learned the Christian religion that was such an organizing principle of your daily life was that you listen to stories. You listen to what the priests would tell you in church. You listen to what your parents would tell you at home. And how wonderful it would be if you had visual images to reinforce this narrative that you are hearing and not reading, as we might imagine it today. So that's a context where objects like these, based on their size alone, the fact that they are not very, very large, suggests to us that they are not coming from churches. They're not altered pieces meant to be seen from a distance. They're meant for people's houses. They're meant for the same positions in those inventories that we find of a Madonna and child here, a Virgin and child there. And even though we don't have examples of them in our show, even if you didn't have enough money to have a painting, an oil on panel or an oil on canvas painting, you still could participate in using visual images by taking advantage of the least expensive form of visual image, which was prints. So woodcuts, engravings, things that were reproducible, very inexpensive, but also less likely to survive because they were on a more fragile medium. So I'm showing you the walking or imagine we're walking down the side of the gallery. If we had been standing near these Madonna and child images when I talked about their smaller scale, I always direct people's attention to the large painting that's down at the far end of the gallery. You can see a large figure of a woman as a contrast. So we might not have a sense of, well, is this a big painting or a small one? Well, you can compare them in size to that big painting and see, okay, that one's definitely large. And we can say that one by its size alone, if you knew nothing else about it, you would have a reasonable guess that that came out of a church. That is meant to be seen from a distance. But before we get down to that altarpiece, to take a look at one of the other paintings that's on this main wall, we have this lovely painting by a pair of brothers from the northern city of Ferrara in Italy. And these are the Dossi brothers, Battista Dossi and Dosso Dossi. And here they are painting not a sort of static scene of the Virgin Mary and child intended to provide a focus for prayer in the home, but they're giving us a little bit of biblical narrative. And many of you, if you have a familiarity with Christian themes, have probably recognized what it is we're seeing here. This is the Flight into Egypt, which comes from the Gospel of Matthew, saying that Joseph has a dream or an angel says to him, arise and take the child and his mother and go into Egypt because Herod is seeking to destroy the baby Jesus. And we have noticed that even though we don't think we're expecting it, that this painting has really become a crowd favorite among visitors to the gallery. I mean, it doesn't hurt if you consider that it is directly on center from the door as you walk in. We were in there earlier just talking with someone about the way that the sort of unusual, impestuous background, the sense of drama that is created by this moody, turbulent sky, the blowing of the palm tree. We don't know what species of palm tree that is. We're still arguing about it. So if you are someone who's interested in trees, you can drop a note into the chat and let us know what kind of palm tree that might be. But this is a scene that has a lot of urgency in it. And if you've seen other depictions of this same biblical narrative, you know that it didn't have to be painted this way. I mean, often we see skies that are blue and sunny and cloudless and it looks like it's 72 degrees. Usually St. Joseph is shown walking and leading the donkey that Mary and Jesus are on. But these painters have just decided to do something different. They decided to get us interested in this narrative in a new way. They've given us the moody background. They've given us this mysterious city with this double mountaintop in the distance that seems to be lit by light from some unknowable source. They've made it clear just from the way that the invisible wind is blowing that palm tree in the direction of their movement were very clear on which way they're going. And they've also animated the relationship between the Virgin Mary and her husband, St. Joseph in a way that you don't often see. And people often laugh when they look at this painting because the first thing they see is they think, well, the Virgin Mary, she's bossing him around. She's telling him not to drop the baby. She's telling him not to go ask for directions, which is amusing. And it's nice to be able to feel that you're connecting to something that was painted in the 1530s and sort of seeing a sense of real human interaction, a real interaction between husband and wife. Of course, are these paintings being made in the Renaissance as a joking commentary on marital harmony? No. They are meant to be serious reflections of these biblical narratives. But it does help to sort of get us interested and get us focused. And if you spend time looking at this painting, you might realize that Mary does have her hand out. She's pointing, Joseph is looking back at her. But it doesn't seem that she's actually pointing to the baby in his cradle. She's pointing rather to something that seems to be blocking the way. It looks like there's like a turnstile blocking the road in front of him. She's calling Joseph's attention to seeing what's happening in front. Kathy has dropped in a question. Who was the woman to the right of Mary in the previous painting? Ah, the woman who was giving us that very direct look. We do not know the identity of that female saint. I say saint because she has a halo around her head in that image. But if Saint Peter is identifiable by the fact that he holds a key, that female saint, and I'll go back here for a second, she is only holding a very... I'm going the wrong direction. She's only holding a very small cross. And that is not actually enough to give her an identity because there are a number of female saints who could be associated with the cross, such as Saint Helena, who is believed to have discovered the true cross in Jerusalem. So there are others. So she is not identified by name. And this painting is the National Gallery in DC. That's a great question. So leaving the tempestuous married couple, moving to the other side of the gallery where we have... We have just one object in the show that is not a painting, and it's what you're seeing on the left side of the wall. That is a plaster cast that belongs to Fairfield University. It is part of the collection of historic plaster casts, of which we have more than 100. And it's a cast after a marble sculpture by Michelangelo called the Petitondo, and that sculpture is in the Bargello in Florence. And one of the reasons we wanted to include it, this painting usually lives in the nursing building. We have it on loan to them. We had to ask for it gently back for the purposes of the show. We wanted to include it as a juxtaposition to the painting that you're seeing framed in the archway on the back wall. And that is a painting attributed to a follower of Michelangelo. And the art historians think that Michelangelo gave a drawing for the Virgin Mary to one of his assistants, possibly a Sienese artist named Piero Dargenta, who then developed the rest of the composition. We borrowed that painting from the Crest Foundation directly in New York, and we thought, well, if we've got a painting that has a connection to Michelangelo, and we've got a plaster cast that is a perfect one-to-one physical copy of Michelangelo's sculpture of the Virgin and Child, why not put them together in the exhibition? Carrie just dropped into the chat that we will be doing an art and focus about that plaster cast on December 15th. So thank you for reminding me of that, because now I'm not going to say too much about it. I'm just going to spoil your appetite for that art and focus, which, as she mentioned, we do in person. So we sit in stools around an art object and have a nice informal conversation. And then I also do it like this on Zoom. So even if you're not local to the area, you're more than welcome to tune in at noon that day on The Quick Live, and we'll be doing that together. So this is the back wall of the exhibition, which is where I usually take folks and spend a bit of time. Not least because those three paintings are all part of the group of five that we were able to borrow directly from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which, as you can imagine, was quite an accomplishment. I mean, we are a little academic art museum, and to have our nation's art gallery lending us objects was really incredible. And for my students in the seminar, you know, they got to see exactly how we were able to have the Crest Foundation sort of smooth the way into making our request for these objects. But even though we were asking for things that were usually in storage at the National Gallery, we didn't get everything that we asked for. We actually, we asked them for about 13 things, and they said we could have five, which meant that we had some choices to make. We had to think about what we wanted to include in an exhibition that's focusing on women and sacred Renaissance painting. So the painting that is directly in the center that is actually, let's see where I started. Oh, there we go. This painting in the center that we already saw is quite large. This is a painting that is by the school of Veronese or the workshop of Veronese, who was a very well known artist in Venice later in the 16th century. And this is the largest painting that we requested for the show. It came in a crate from the National Gallery that weighed 800 pounds. The painting itself is only 80, but the box it came in was massive. And it just barely fit in the door to the gallery. So when I mentioned earlier that my students really had to think about dimensions in terms of what they were requesting, we couldn't have asked for anything larger than this painting. And I really have great fun in bringing students and visitors over to this painting and asking them if they can help me figure out who this saint is. So she has a halo. Students are usually very quick to pick up in the fact that because she lacks the accessory baby, she's probably not the Virgin Mary, which is correct. She has two attributes in her hands. She has a very long object that kind of looks like a feather, but is in fact intended to be a palm frond. And then she has something else that's on a stick, a little round object. And sometimes I have to invite people to get very close to look at that object. And it's about, I would say 60, 40, whether they're going to figure out correctly or not, that that is in fact an eyeball on a stick. It's usually fun to look at people's faces when I say, yes, that is a disembodied eye on a stick being held by this lady. Because people who come from, let's say a Catholic background, a lot of the time you're like, oh, I know who that is. And people who don't be like, why does the lady have the eyeball on the stick? And it's just such a great reminder of this painting does expect you to approach it with a lot of context. In its original position in a church in the town of Montagnana in northern Italy, this would have been above an altar on the side wall of a church. So not the main altar, but a subsidiary one. And we would have entered as Christians, as Catholics, as people aware of objects like this, ready to decode what we're seeing before us. We would see this well-dressed female saint seeing her halo behind her head. We would see the palm frond and we would recognize that, ah, this is a symbol of martyrdom. So this is a female saint who died for her Christian faith. And then the eyeball would be the finishing touch. The eyeball will tell us, this is St. Lucie. Now, if you don't have all of those pieces at your ready behest, then you will be left wondering what on earth is going on. But for those of this time who have been raised on these stories, they're ready to make those connections. St. Lucie was associated, she was the patron saint of vision ailments, because her story involved the removal of her eyes during torture, which is not a very nice story. But she's meant to be inspirational, inspirational to women. She was martyred for her conversion. Another version of the story, there was a non-Christian suitor who was lusting after her eyes. So she removed them herself in that version of the tale and sent them to him to prevent him from falling into sin. So she is meant to be a model of Christian female virtue. Which is not always a model that we want necessarily to engage with in 2022, but it's important to think about when these objects, when they come from and who they were originally for. And when they came and who they originally for, has to do a lot with the gentleman at the lower right, who you might be able to guess just by the fact that he's very small, he has no halo. He is not a religious figure. And in fact, someone walking up to this painting at the end of the 16th century would have recognized that he is dressed in very fine contemporary clothing. This is the patron of the artwork. So this is the individual who paid for this altarpiece to be made. And isn't this great? He gets to be in the artwork. That's the wonderful thing about Renaissance art. You pay enough money. You can be right in the action. So you have to imagine this being in the public space of a church, where it's a very small town. There are really only two big churches. Everyone would know this gentleman. Everyone would walk in and be like, well, that's your uncle Nicolo. And then another generation, that's your great uncle Nicolo. Unfortunately for this gentleman, once this painting was removed from that church, which happened in the 18th century and sold, and ultimately acquired by the Crest Foundation and given to the National Gallery in, I believe, 1940s, his identity is completely lost. So he would be shocked to find out that we have no idea who he is, because he would have imagined this painting remaining in his hometown forever, a permanent testament to not only his wealth, but also his piety. So looking to the left on the wall, this is our gem. You've seen this image, if you've seen any of our marketing for the show, also coming from the National Gallery. This is the Holy Family by El Greco. We are so delighted to be able to get this painting, and it's very small. I just want to go back again and show you. So the altar piece in the center, large, grand, intended to be seen from a distance. El Greco's Holy Family, not actually intended to be seen by us at all, really. This painting was in the artist's studio at the time of his death in 1614, which happened in Toledo, Spain, and it shows up in his inventory, which was compiled, I believe, by his son. And it's identified there as the Holy Mary, the Virgin with her mother St. Anne, St. John the Baptist, St. Joseph, and the infant Jesus. I say those names because if we were looking at this and you had a familiarity with members of the Holy Family and you saw the Virgin Mary and you saw the baby, and you saw St. John the Baptist, you might think, oh, well, this older lady must be St. Elizabeth, John the Baptist's mother, the Virgin's cousin. The only reason we identify her instead as the Virgin Mary's mother, Anne, is because of the way the painting was described in that inventory. So a little bit of our historical trivia for you there. In this painting, when I said it was not intended to be seen, this is not a finished artwork. It is the only example in our exhibition of a painting that was a functional object in an artist's workshop. They call it a ricordo, something that was meant to remind the artist of paintings he had done already so that if a new client walked in and said, hey, I saw that Holy Family you made for that church in Madrid, could I have another? You would be able to remember the composition and recreate what you've done. So there is a very large, a more than five foot tall version of this painting in the Prado in Madrid. There are some other versions floating around, including one that is still in Toledo. But it's a great reminder that for artists working in the 16th, 15th and 16th centuries, we often think of art as a calling. Art is made for art's sake. But for these painters, most of whom are men, art is a business. And it's usually a business they inherit because their father was a painter and their grandfather, a painter before them. And for El Greco, he grew up on the island of Crete. He trained briefly in Venice. He was exposed to a very different style of art making than what he'd grown up doing. And he wound up ultimately living most of his life in Spain, in Toledo, where he was known as the Greek guy. That's how we get his name. Instead of calling him Domenico Stéocotopoulos, we call him El Greco. But what is also interesting about this painting with regards to his expression is that its presence in the show is a noticeable part because one of the students who proposed a theme for the show, his name was Kevin, he had proposed a show focused around the Holy Family with the explanation that after the pandemic was over, that he thought people would be very drawn to depictions of family, to depictions of touch and affectionate warmth between people who love each other after so long being separated from so many people that we cared about. Which we all found that to be very moving. And that is one of the reasons that we were determined to use one of our five requests to the National Gallery to have the El Greco come to Fairfield. And it was also very special that this was not one of the paintings that was in storage. They did take this off the wall in D.C. and send it to Fairfield, Connecticut. So that to us was just a great, a great coup. And I want to show you as well just two more paintings and plenty of time for questions as well. The painting to the right of the large St. Lucie. The last one I'm showing you that came from the National Gallery. We were also very much determined that we had to get this one. And you might notice at the bottom right that there is another figure that seems to be sharing and going back to the larger view. Look at the big St. Lucie and the little painting next to it. Now these are paintings that are there on different surfaces. The Lucie is on a canvas. The painting at the right is on wood. They're separated by 150 years of time. And yet you see in both of them, a smaller figure at the right kneeling in prayer. Both of them represent donor portraits. We have our unknown gentleman in the center. But here we have something quite different. Not only do we have a nun from the 15th century. We have a nun who actually left her name painted underneath her in very tiny letters. It's hard to see even in the gallery. Swara Ginevra, sister Ginevra. Whoever sister Ginevra was, she wanted her name, her face to be remembered. She wanted to be shown as a pious member of her order, wearing her monastic habit. She's kneeling before a Virgin Martyr saint, St. Ursula. And she, you know, clearly had the resources to have an object like this made because its artist is one of the most famous Florentine artists of the 15th century. An artist named Benotso Gotzely, who works for the Medici family. So even though in this case, as opposed to the unknown gentleman in the St. Lucie, we don't know anything more about her in her situation. It's up to know her name and the fact that she had the resources to make a painting like this happen. We're so delighted that we were able to get this painting from the National Gallery as well. And last but not least, I'm showing you the right hand wall. And you see this very large round painting, which came to us from the University of Miami's Art Museum. And the director there, Jill Dupy, was the founding director of Fairfield Museum. So we were able to call upon that relationship to borrow a number of crest paintings from that institution as well. In this painting, well, I'm just going to go back to this for a second. I was remarking on this to carry earlier that, you know, in preparing an exhibition, we were not able to travel around the country and visit every painting in person. We relied on reference photographs. And in almost every case, the reference photograph was nowhere near as stunning as the actual art object. So you're seeing on screen the very same reference image that we were working with. But I'm going back there. Look how brilliant the colors appear in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. And these are not images that have had their colors changed sort of in post-processing. That's how it looks in the gallery. We were just absolutely stunned when this and so many of the other paintings sort of opened and came out of their crates. It was really just wonderful. But we use this image because it's a bit easier to see. This is an image that finds so many interesting, well, interesting saints. For example, at the left, you see two men with their heads bowed together. We have Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome. And although it is difficult to see in, without any close-ups here, there's a little Saint Christopher crossing the river with the Christ child in the background. And on the mountaintop, Saint Francis receiving the stigmata from the seraph. And then in the foreground, the very familiar, you know, virgin and child. But what we're really drawn to in this painting was the saint at the right. And we have joked that we have asked many visiting priests, Jesuits among them, to identify if they can who this saint is. And many have immediately jumped to, okay, we have a female saint with long hair. It must be Mary Magdalene. No, that's a red herring. Her name is Mary, but she's a different Mary. She is Saint Mary of Egypt, who is an early Christian, a so-called desert mother of early Christianity. Her origin story is rather misogynistic in that she is described as having been a prostitute and one who loves sex so much that she didn't charge for her services until she has a conversion moment. She sees an image of the virgin and child, excuse me, just the Virgin Mary in Jerusalem. She repents of her life and treats into the desert to spend the rest of her life in penitence. And as her clothes disintegrate into the desert, she is rewarded by God for her penitence by being covered head to foot in very coarse hair. So usually if I'm talking to a group of Fairfield undergrads, I like to get a sense of their faces because there will be some female students going, I don't really like the story, especially when I point out that just like Lucy, Saint Mary of Egypt, she is meant to be a role model for women that there is the path of virtuous femininity that defends their Christian face even unto death. And then there's this, which represents a path back to the light if you have lived life of sin. Again, maybe not necessarily lessons that we are as keen to hear or that we are as interested in from our own 2020 perspective, but they represented a very intentional set of role models for women that weren't just the Virgin Mary. Because although the Virgin Mary was established as the ultimate ideal of virtuous femininity in this time period, it was also recognized that not every woman could be the Virgin Mary. After all, she was considered to have been miraculously the immaculately conceived mother of God. So not a role model that all women could actually achieve. And therefore you had plenty of other role models in the form of female saints, martyrs, nuns to give Christian women in this time period something to aspire to and focus on. I see we have a question in the chat. Let's see. Carol Langdon says, I remember sitting El Greco with Professor Lyosov, one of my most favorite classes at Fairfield. He must be thrilled. Philip was delighted with the show, I have to tell you. And if you weren't able to attend our watch, our opening night lecture, I shared there a anecdote that Philip remembered about bringing our Crest paintings, our 10 paintings from where they had been in Bridgeport to Fairfield. If you remember Father Charles Allen, Philip said that he and Father Allen borrowed a university maintenance van and they borrowed a bunch of moving blankets from the maintenance crew and they went over there and they wrapped these old master paintings just up in blankets, chucked them in the back of the truck and just bumped over the streets to Fairfield and they unloaded them in Father Allen's office in Bellarmine like they were offloading crates of Scotch whiskey during the prohibition. So what an interesting story to bring paintings like these to Fairfield and actually our second painting that is in the show is hiding in that second archway. It's a little painting that's hanging on the back wall. But we have been so delighted this semester to have our Crest paintings sharing space with so many other fantastic objects from this collection. But again, more than 3,000 objects. I mean, we only have just about, I think, 18 paintings that are on view in the show. But I really could not have done this both without Cary's support, without the Crest Foundation's support and also my students. So that is Phoebe, that is Chelsea, Matt, Kevin, Maddie. Now I'm going to remember, Miss remember Julia and Rosalinda and Rosalinda is now a member of our museum team. So she is continuing to work with us and Phoebe is the student that Cary mentioned who is curating her own entirely self-curated exhibition that's opening in April. So we have just had a great experience in working with Fairfield students on this exhibition. We're planning to do it again. So in two years time, I believe, we'll have an exhibition of old master prints borrowed from Khan College. And I will be working on curating that with another group of Fairfield students this coming fall. That is all I had to share with you all. Thank you for listening. And if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them. And as Cary mentioned, you can visit our website and read the exhibition brochure. You can take a virtual tour. There are so many ways to engage with the exhibition. And we certainly do hope that if you are available in the vicinity of Fairfield that you will come and see the show before it closes on December 17th. I don't see any questions. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, you're fine if there's questions. Yes. Well, I think that question was just thanking you for sharing your art. Cary and Michelle, thank you so much for your time and for presenting on this amazing exhibit. And thank you for all attending tonight. We hope you enjoyed the tour. And if you'd like to check out our upcoming events, please visit fairfield.edu backslash alumni events. All of our in-person and virtual events are listed there. We hope to see you all again soon and have a great night. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.