 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name's Emi Gillette. I'm a collections researcher. Let's go today up into room number 15, a little corner room with all kinds of things dominated by this wonderful Renoir image of a nude woman whose nudity, the vegetation, I suppose even the kind of reddish color is echoed throughout the wall ensemble that Barnes arranged and maybe this late medieval image of the coronation of the Virgin Mary, zoom in a bit, these other Renoirs flanking it, this Korean image of a sage with a tiger, a post-Byzantine scene of Christ's nativity, a New Mexican santo of the Archangel Raphael, more flowers over here. We also see the woman's self-adornment that we might be able to recognize in this vitrine with the silver Native American jewelry and it's full as well with an Egyptian relief fake antique sculpture, real antique sculpture and this case here, wooden case here right in the middle with a bunch of ancient and late antique bone carvings and it's in this case that we're going to take a further look at the central object. So let's head on in further. Here it is, it's a hairpin made probably around the four century CE somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean world. There's enough stylistic material consistency with these objects that it's very hard to tell precisely where but what we see is a woman, the head of a woman that you might be able to tell was originally painted with a pigment in her pupils, beautiful face with a straight nose, high cheekbones and this elaborate coiffure arranged in these tiered rows carved out to delineate grades with this sort of split down the middle stacked up it's kind of cleft in back and then what would be her neck is this kind of bead and reel motif going down into the pin itself and I noted that all of these objects in this case are in fact bone. You can probably see the grain of the material here and this would have been bones from animals that would ordinarily have been butchered for other purposes anyway, cows, sheeps, goats, that kind of thing probably from the leg bones to get the kind of long grain appropriate for a hairpin and from what I understand of bones, bone was a better material than the more luxury ivory for something like a hairpin because of the I guess elasticity that you could get from organic collagen versus strength from inorganic mineral compounds within the bone. So a woman clearly would have worn it in her hair in a hairdo that probably looked much like that and to get a sense of what that would have looked like let's take a peek at this fine mummy portrait from Egypt this one's now at the Getty Museum probably second century CE from Roman Egypt and these sorts of portraits are just gorgeous with the shine in the woman's eye her dazzling jewelry you can see the shape of the mummy that it would have adorned she's got her gold wreath in her hair and back here we can see a hairpin sticking out in a hairdo that's not precisely like but I think rather close to that of the hairpin that's here at the barns and so it turns out that there's an entire field of hair archaeology based on visual evidence material evidence and literary evidence and one piece of that to get a sense of what women were what hair meant for women I'm going to read you from the second third century church father Clement of Alexandria and who would have been active around the same time and place as the portrait that we see right here roughly and it's an odd quote because in many matters Clement of Alexandria is what we would almost call a feminist holding views such as the equality of women and men and God and that both Christ and God the Father encompass both female and male aspects but with that being said here's what he's got to say about self-adornment of women he he wrote it's enough for women to protect their locks and bind up the hair simply along the neck with a plain hairpin nourishing taste blocks with simple care to true beauty and actually let's for the sake of this go back to our room so we can see how it stacks up for meritorious plating of the hair and putting it up in tresses contribute to make women look ugly so those women who wear gold occupying themselves and curling at their locks and engaged in anointing their cheeks painting their eyes and dyeing their hair and practicing the other pernicious arts of luxury decking covering the flesh and truths imitate some Egyptians in order to attract their infatuated lovers but if one withdraws the veil of the temple I mean the headdress the dye the clothes the gold the paint the cosmetics that is the web consisting of them the veil with the view of finding within the true beauty he will be disgusted I know well for he will not find the image of God dwelling within as his meat but instead of it a fornicator and adulterous has occupied the shrine of the soul so um oh dear um so it seems very much that Clempt Alexander would not have approved of adornment such as this and yet with that being said I want to look at another object that might give for the context to our hairpin as well this is the projecta casket at the British Museum made in Rome around the year 380 let's zoom in a bit so it's called the projecta casket because it was made for this woman depicted here named projecta on the occasion of her marriage to a man named Secundus and we can see her seated she's sticking a hairpin in her hair attended by maids one with the mirror one bringing a casket to her much like the one that this is peacocks birds noted for their vanity in ancient bestiaries and medieval ones as well with these grapefines going around some other birds and projecta's image is echoed up here or perhaps it's better to say she echoes this image of the goddess Venus writing waves on a cockle shell holding up a mirror and you can actually see her reflection putting a hairpin in her own hair um with these cupid or puti figures writing on these like um tritons bringing her a casket and other objects of personal adornment as well and so looking at a casket like this it reads almost as this image of street up vanity of the type that Clement was describing but there is an inscription around it saying projecta and Secundus again her husband may you live in Christ so they're a faithful Christian couple who have brought this image even a Venus under the auspices of Christianity and it turns out that this is actually an image type called the chaste Venus that was popular in late antiquity into Byzantium where if you are a married woman seeking to have children it was okay even encouraged to make yourself Venus like attractive to your husband in order to accomplish that and then say have more um Christian children to come and so going back to our hairpin even it was for a Christian woman um like projecta maybe it was for a pagan woman whatever the case it was an object that a woman would have used to make herself beautiful and attractive with hair um being the prime side of that and um on something that I think really compelled me to mention was women when they were doing their hair like this they would do it with wax with henna they could get even um hair imports um from Germany if you wanted blonde or indium if you wanted black but whatever the case may be um it's an object of beautification and we can think of it in terms of the other um displays of beauty that we might see in this wall from the the native american silver to the Renoir even to images of the virgin Mary over here and you might also be able to think about analogs in our own world today and so thank you so much for watching and and that is it for today's Barnes Takeout. I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.