 Hi everybody, welcome to Barnes Takeout. My name is Kaelin Jewel. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time with you talking about a group of bone inlay objects that are on display in gallery 15, which we see in front of us right now. These are objects that I have talked about before, but I wanted to talk about them a little bit more specifically in relationship to some really interesting religious traditions and overlap that was happening at the time of their manufacture. So if we zoom in here and we look more closely at this case, this is a case that my colleagues and I have spent other Barnes Takeouts discussing. There are Egyptian objects in here, ancient Greek objects, and those that were made in the late Roman period, which is what we're going to talk about today. So this case here, specifically this little wooden box, here, is filled with these little bone carvings, which in many cases were used as inlay for objects and furniture. And I want to look more specifically at these three here. So this one of a dancing figure, this dancing figure over here, and then this dancing figure. So let's look at the two flat ones first. So here is one. We can see that it is a female figure. She is draped in a flowing garment. She is engaging in a dance, and she's playing a musical instrument here. Some kind of a percussive instrument, probably like a tambourine. Her head is sort of thrown back. Let's look at the other one. So here is the other one. We can see a similar figure. So she is wearing a flowing garment. She is standing in this nice contra-pasto or sense of counterbalanced pose. We get a sense that she's moving and she's swaying. She's also holding up one of those tambourines behind her head. And the flatness of these, and these are carved in what we could call shallow relief. The flatness of these lead us to believe that they probably were used as inlay in objects such as this. So this is not at the barns. This is a jewelry box that was made somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. It is today at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and it was made sometime between the fourth and the sixth centuries CE. So around the same time that our little bone inlay at the barns were made. And if we look closer at the top of this box, you can see the flat panels of human figures doing various things. So they have a similar sort of aesthetic to what we see in our bone carvings from the barn. So this is the kind of context that we could find our bone lay in originally back in the late Roman period. But this one is a little bit more rounded. We get a sense of its rounded quality because of the way that the artist has used the curvature of the bone to accentuate or to sort of go along with the curvature of some of this drapery, her arm extending over the back of her head. And you can see when we look closely that she's holding on to a musical instrument. Again, one of those tambourine-like instruments. And she's dancing, she's swaying, and we can get a sense of movement from the way that her drapery is represented. And this more three-dimensional type of inlay was probably used for furniture, for something like this. Now, this is an extraordinary example. Not at the barns. This is at the Met in New York. This is a Roman couch and foot stool that was discovered at a Roman villa somewhere outside of the city of Rome. And it dates probably to the first century CE. And it's been heavily reconstructed. But reconstructed from these kind of ancient inlay pieces, which we can see here. I mean, you can see that it's all over. Some of them are flat. Some of them are more sculptural. And if we look at the foot stool, we can see that there are these kind of squat proportion little winged, cupid-like figures. And between them are these animals that have little spots on them. And these animals are probably supposed to be leopards, which in the ancient world were often associated in the ancient Mediterranean, I should say, were often associated with the god Dionysus, also known as Bacchus in ancient Rome, who was the god of wine, of drinking, of partying, of revelry. And the so-called cult of Dionysus continued to be popular even after the advent of Christianity. So we have here an example of a tapestry. So this is a decorative wall hanging that was made in Egypt, probably in southern Egypt. It dates also to the same time period we're talking about 4th to 6th centuries. And we see here a representation of Dionysus in the center. And he's standing on some leopards. So we can see their spot here. You can also see Dionysus's leopard garment that he's wearing, this flowing drapery that flows behind him. He's holding up a bunch of grapes. Flanking him are our dancers, similar to the dancers that we have on our bone inlay at the barn. These dancers were known as Minas. And they were the followers, the female followers of Dionysus. And they were famous or infamous for their commitment to Dionysus. And they would dance themselves into a frenzy. And there are ancient stories that talk about them getting so frenzied and so out of control that they start to tear apart animals and eat them and do all of these kind of really kind of extraordinary things. So when we see them, they are representative of partying of excess. And notice here in the background, all of these figures, and here you have a satyr, one of the male followers associated with the cult of Dionysus. You've got a couple of dolphins here. And in the background, all of this is taking place against a field of grapevine. So we can see the grape leaves here and again pointing you back to that bunch of grapes that Dionysus is sort of holding up above his head. So Dionysus, this interest in wine, this interest in the grapevine, was something that was popular and present in other religious traditions that were burgeoning in this late Roman period. One of them was known as Christianity. And the Christian cult emerged out of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first century. And when we look at one of our earliest examples of this Christian imagery, here we can see an image of Christ in the center. He has some rays of light behind his head. He's against a field of grapevine leaves. And this recalls the Gospel stories from the Christian New Testament, specifically from the Gospel of John, in which Christ is telling a parable, so one of these stories, and he refers to himself as being the true vine. He said, I am the true vine. My father is the gardener. And so this interest in vines, grapevines, wine is not something that was exclusive to Dionysus, but was also sort of taken up and utilized by these other, what we would call mystery religions, these religious traditions that required mysterious initiation rituals. And Christianity was one of them that was very, that was emerging in this late Roman period and becoming quite popular. So this is this mosaic that you see here is a vault. It's a ceiling, and it's a mosaic. It's a black and white image. It comes from the Necropolis below St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, so in the Vatican. So this is one of our earliest images, and it dates to around the third century CE. Let's look at the interior of a church that dates to about 100 years later. So this is a church that is known as Santa Costanza, and it was originally built by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century as a mausoleum dedicated to his daughter Constantina. And I want you to look at the mosaic vaulting of this portion of the church. And we're going to look at this more closely. Here's a closer view. You can get a better sense of this interior of this church. And we're going to look at this panel more closely. Here we have the panel where you have grape vines that are scrolling across the vault. You have these little blue skinned, what are known as puto figures, these little winged creatures who are stomping on wine or stomping on grapes in the manufacture of wine. And at the center you have an image of a young woman. Perhaps this is an image of Constantine's daughter. Constantine very famously being the Roman emperor that legalized Christianity in the early fourth century. So it's at this time that you have all of these really interesting religious traditions, pagan religious traditions, Christian religious traditions that are sort of overlapping each other. And they are pulling inspiration, artistic inspiration from one another in really kind of dynamic ways. So when we see these late Roman objects at the barn and we see them in their little case here, it's sort of hard to get a sense of that rich tradition. But that's sort of what's kind of undergirding what we see in these objects here. And if you're interested in any of this kind of overlap, this syncretic overlap of religious traditions and artistic styles between paganism, Christianity, I would encourage you to take my class that I am teaching in July called Light in the Dark Ages, where we'll explore a lot of these themes. So thanks for joining me today in this Barns Takeout and stay tuned for another one. Take care.