 Hi everybody, welcome to another barns takeout, your daily serving of art. My name is Kaelin Jewel, I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation, and today I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about a very small object that is in gallery number 15 up on the second floor, which we can see on the screen right here. It's another one of these very densely packed galleries at the foundation. It has a whole bunch of different objects from all different time periods and different materials. We've got these American or probably American chests, small chests down here from the 19th century. We've got these fabulous early 20th century bronze sculptures by Jacques Lipschitz. We've got Korean works of art here. We've got some sort of post-Byzantine icons here. We've got this kind of smattering of fleshy soft colored Renoir images. We've got a late medieval painting over here and all the metal work. But what I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about was this case, this glass case in the middle that has a couple of shelves on it. Let's zoom in. There's a lot of stuff going on in here. Those of you who maybe have spent time in gallery 15 at the foundation, know that these cases can be a little bit overwhelming because there's so much to look at. We've got some Navajo jewelry here, the silver and turquoise. We've got some Egyptian objects down here that some of my colleagues have already spoken about in previous Barnes takeouts. We've got these large ceramic vessels in the corners here that come from the ancient Greek world. And then we've got this little wooden frame that has some little bone carvings in it. And I don't want to talk about all of these bone carvings. I just want to focus on this guy right here. So let's go. Let's look at him. Here he is. This was made sometime in the fourth century by an artist somewhere probably in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is carved out of bone and Dr. Barnes purchased this object probably in the mid 1920s, maybe around 1924. There's a lot of kind of research work that we still need to do to try to figure out exactly where Dr. Barnes, where and when Dr. Barnes bought this. But it's likely that he purchased this object along with the other ones that we saw in that case from a Greek antiquities dealer that had a shop in Paris. And Dr. Barnes had sent a colleague of his to go purchase ancient objects for his collection in the 1920s. And this was really at the beginning of the foundation as an educational institution. So Dr. Barnes was in the midst of putting his collection together. He was buying modern art in the form of paintings and sculpture. And he was also buying these ancient objects, whether they are from ancient Egypt, ancient Greece or like we see in front of us, probably from ancient Rome. Now the title of this little object is Christ or a philosopher or an apostle. So he's got several different names and we'll get into his identity in a second. But let's zoom in and look at the material here. And this is just such a wonderful way to look at this object because there's no way we could see it this closely if we were in the gallery. So when we zoom in, we can see here the head of the figure. He's got some kind of wavy hair here. You can see that there are these holes that are sort of arranged in a way that give us a sense that the piece of bone that this was carved from was had a vertical grain to it. And these types of bones were really common for little objects like this. And this was probably a piece of furniture inlay, maybe something that decorated like a medicine box or a jewelry box. And these types of bones were, they tended to be the leg bones of four legged animals like goats and pigs and sheep and cattle. A friend of mine who is a zoarchaeologist or an archaeologist who specializes in animal bones on archaeological sites named Jackie Meyer, who's a professor of anthropology at the University of North Florida. She and I were walking through the galleries one day and she looked at these bones and she instantly said, oh, those are from the leg bones of four legged animals. So, you know, it was really cool to have that conversation with her about how these artists were utilizing butchered animals that were in their communities and using their bones and other parts of their bodies to make these objects to decorate their surroundings, which is really interesting. So, now let's try to figure out what's going on in terms of who this is. I mentioned that the title here is Christ or a philosopher or an apostle. And if we think about images of Christ from the Christian tradition, he usually doesn't look like this. I think when we think about Christ, he usually looks more like this. And this is a 15th century Flemish painting that is on display on the same wall in Gallery 15 at the Barnes. And we can see Christ here who is helping to put a crown on his mother, the Virgin Mary. And if we zoom into Christ, this is usually the kind of standard, more or less standard version of what we think of when we think of images of Christ. And here we see that he's got long hair. It's a little bit wavy. He's got sort of a scraggly beard. And that's the Christ we're used to seeing, right? There's another example of Christ in Gallery 15 that is just above the painting we just looked at. And this was made sometime in the 19th century by an artist in the American State of New Mexico. And what we see here is a representation of the crucifixion. It's done with a very distinctive kind of southwestern style that is tied to missionaries who were living in the area at the time. But if we zoom in on Christ's face, we can see again that he's got that kind of wavy long hair and a beard. So let's go back to our bone carving, which was made much, much earlier. I mentioned it was made in the fourth century. So this is during the period of the kind of institution of Christianity as being a state religion for the ancient Roman Empire. You have emperors like Constantine the Great and Theodosius the Great really looking to Christianity as being a useful religious tradition for them politically, socially, all kinds of, it's a whole thing to talk about. But in this early period, images of Christ had not yet been codified. So they hadn't been standardized. So what we see here is a person who is beardless. He's got some wavy hair. It's kind of short though. He's wearing a toga that's wrapped around his arm. He's holding a scroll and we can see the toga is wrapping around his back and draping across his body. And you've got this really nice sense of the movement of the fabric as it moves across the body. Really interesting. But how might this be identified as Christ? To understand that it's helpful to look at a monument that is located in Italy. So this is an interior photograph of a building, a church, a chapel in a church called San Lorenzo in Milan. And there's a mosaic here in one of the little apces of the chapel. And if we look at a close view of it, we can see here this representation of Christ as a philosopher. And you can see he's holding up a scroll here. He's got this large halo behind his head. There is a sense of a cross or maybe a Cairo symbol, which was a symbol associated with Christianity in the early period. And even today, you've got an alpha and an omega behind his head. So it's very clear that we're looking at an image of Christ. When we return back to the barns and look at our little bone carving, it could be Christ. This is an early period. We know that there was a lot of slippage and imagery. People hadn't yet decided, well, Christ should look like this. Christ should look like that. And there was this desire to make Christ look like figures from antiquity that people were already familiar with. And so we're seeing an example of that. But again, it could just be a philosopher. It could be an apostle or it could be Christ. So when you guys come back and we all come back to the Barnes Foundation, keep an eye out for that little tiny bone carving made in the fourth century embedded into this larger wall that has other images of Christ like we've seen. And it makes for kind of a fun way to think about how artists have utilized images of Christ across the centuries and have done so in different ways. So thanks for joining me today. Be sure to stay tuned for the next Barnes Takeout. Take care. Bye-bye. Get ready to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.