 Welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher at the Foundation. Now today, let's head on into Room 23, looking into the corner, and we're going to focus on this painting. Let's go in a little bit closer, entitled The Rose Tower, painted in the year 1913 by the Italian artist, Giorgio D'Cureco. Now, let's zoom on in. Okay, so what have we got here? Like I said, painted in 1913 by D'Cureco, and The Rose Tower is indeed dominated by this big rose tower at center. Some scholars have looked into this and proposed that it might actually be this funerary tower of Sicilian Mattilla, an ancient Roman monument in the city of Rome, that is ancient up to about here and has these medieval accretions on top, that you might be able to see looks a bit like those battlements up there, but clearly it's, if it is that it is a little bit abstracted, and as much as it looms, it's kind of cut off at base by the slow wall over here. Beyond, we can see the red tiled roofs of some, I suppose, generic Mediterranean town, Italy, perhaps, or Greece, where D'Cureco had been born and grown up. Mountains beyond, lit by the sort of late afternoon greenish-blueish sky. Then we have, again, just Mediterranean style buildings, this one with the shutters and doors shut being sort of hit by the sunlight, this one causing the raking shadows across with the arcade and windows open. We have also here a statue of a horse on a plinth, black horse with a foreleg up, and down here what looks perhaps like some other maybe empty plinth. And so what on earth is going on with this painting, we might be wondering, and I think the answer is, as a matter of fact, quite a lot. We have this Roman monument that for D'Cureco seems to symbolize this, the word that he used was the sort of nostalgia for the infinite, but I think that the real key to the picture is in the horse to begin understanding it. So let's go on over. And even though the tower is kind of generic or made generic, the horse is specifically this monument in the Italian city terrain to Carlo Alberto up here, although in D'Cureco's picture the horse itself, let's go back, is kind of obscured by this open arcade of the building over here. And that's where entering is where D'Cureco's hero, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was living in the year 1888 in an apartment overlooking that statue and in that year which happened to be the same that D'Cureco was born. Nietzsche saw a horse getting publicly flogged, unfortunately, and ran out to embrace the horse and try to save it. And this was the precipitate of a breakdown that Nietzsche suffered where his really brilliant mind kind of unraveled. And so it was really a liminal moment for the philosopher and for D'Cureco. Now, some years later, in 1910, D'Cureco was standing in a square in Italy on an autumn afternoon, October, with the light working like this. He'd been reading Friedrich Nietzsche and thought that this afternoon light kind of cast over the big geometries of Italian buildings exposed the metaphysics, the second order of things in a very kind of Nietzschean sense. And D'Cureco started to identify himself with Nietzsche, especially because of the like coincidence of his birth year with what had happened with Nietzsche and Turin and thought that his paintings like this one from what he termed his metaphysical period could embody the thought of Nietzsche. And that to my mind embodies kind of three components. And the first of those, if you're familiar with Nietzsche, you might have heard the phrase God is dead, which was a point that was really much more cultural than theological, as I understand it, where in the 19th century kind of the church was no longer governing people's lives, giving external meaning in a way that it had in centuries past. But that opened up the ability for people to create their own meaning, something that Nietzsche and then D'Cureco picked up as a sort of will to power, often by recourse to the myths of the past. And so in this way Nietzsche had kind of come to identify himself with the son of Carlo Alberto. And so we can kind of see this horse is almost an avatar of Nietzsche in the same way in D'Cureco's own self mythologizing he comes to be a kind of Nietzsche. And both of them turned to the classical world for inspiration. And that again is a kind of another another point. The third part of Nietzsche metaphysics that I think is really important for D'Cureco is the idea of eternal return or recurrence where everything that's happened, that that is happening has happened before and will happen again. And, and that is really what makes meanings progressive and accumulate through time. And so I think that by recycling these modern classical motifs, D'Cureco is putting new meaning onto them into these structures of thinking that he's creating for the world. And it's something that Albert Barnes was very mindful of. And so the architecture itself is kind of classicizing, you might notice. But if you look at it, you'll be able to see that the perspective isn't perfect. And, and that's something that is actually sort of on purpose where D'Cureco was not looking to like high Renaissance perfection, trying to recreate the world precisely as you see it specifically, but looking to older masters, such as Giotto. And this is an example I love from the church of Santa Croce in Florence, where it's the ascension of St. John the Evangelist coming out of his tomb down here to the surprise of people around and assuming straight through this like opened up building into the arms of Christ in heaven and D'Cureco actually wrote in the paintings of John Giotto the architectonic sense reaches high metaphysical spaces, all of the openings the doors the arcade the windows that companies figures let us present the cosmic mystery. And this is something that Albert Barnes himself had actually recognized. Let me go back. Barnes wrote D'Cureco's design is attained by modifications of old and new traditions. His massive architectural elements are reminiscent of old Italian masters. He's made a new use though of linear patterns and the geometric forms of Cubism. D'Cureco's best work is a plastic equivalent of mystical poetry. It's this ability to render the essence of the metaphysical which was responsible for the development of the movement of surrealism. And for the record, both Dr. Barnes as well as George D'Cureco hated the movement surrealism. But to look back at where painting is, I think this is really kind of the best of the Barnes Foundation in in a certain way where the artists that Dr. Barnes did champion the most really did draw from world traditions in order to create something new. And if we take this idea that meaning is progressive, it's new for us to each time we enter into the foundation. So that's it for today's take out. And thank you so much for joining. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.