 Hi everybody, welcome to today's barns takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher here at the foundation and today I'm going to go with you up to room number 21 at the barns to look at what's definitely one of our more unusual objects, this so-called portable oil lamp down here on the floor between these two and irons. And before we do a deeper dive into that object, I would like to take a sec to think with you about its place in the gallery, a display which I should note Albert Barns head personally arranged and remains exactly as he left it. And I'm going to read to you a passage that he actually himself wrote once he started to seriously collect metalworks in the middle of the 1930s. And barns wrote that antique ironwork exhibited alongside the paintings has two purposes. First, the motifs such as arabesque patterns etc discernible in a picture have their analog sometimes a very close one in the ironwork. Second, we regard the creators of antique wrought iron just as authentic and artist as Titian, Renoir or Cézanne. And so what we've got here is him really upholding the art of metal working and asking us to look for formal analogs in the objects and pictures that surround it. And so say looking at the main vessel of the lamp maybe we can see its sinuous forms in this reclining nude up here by Amadeus Modigliani. Maybe we can even see again the kind of wavy pattern in the flame around the Renoir. And then sometimes I like to think about thematic connections as well like with this being a lamp something that involved fire maybe looking at this biblical image of the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace or over here with thinking about the lamp's light the transfiguration of Jesus Christ where he's radiating divine light and I do think it's rather nice that the lamp stands between these two and irons down here. And so you know kind of having looked at its place in the gallery that gives us a place to start looking closer at our object itself. So here let's head on in now. Okay so what we've got is a lamp standing on mounted on top of a turtle down here. You can see got maybe a little smile on his face scales three little toes on each foot. The shell is subdivided up and each of the little like cells in the shell has this square with a dot in the middle and then there's this stem that's mounted on this little square base made up of four kind of squarish twisted twisted rods that as you go up get like narrower and twistier and then once we get to the lamp up here which I have maybe some doubts that it would have been functional but we've got the body of the lamp and then over here the little man who seems to be hairy hanging with his hands clasped around the nozzle his head is kind of affixed to it up here. His shape the shape of his body nicely echoes kind of an opposite the shape of the spout and he's got one leg affixed on its underside and then the other kind of dangling or kicking and then his companion on the other side is this dragon also scaly like the turtle below and it has its forepaws out and it's got these these wings that fold around the body of the lamp and then a kind of corkscrew tail over here that very nicely echoes the twisted rods of the stem and then on top we have another motif which seems to be acting as a handle of a snake all curled up in the sort of O shape and that refers to a mythological motif called an oroboros which means a serpent swallowing its own tail. Now how on earth do we make sense of this kind of wild and wonderful lamp? I think I ought to start by saying that we believe that it's actually made it's an assembly of unrelated fragments put together at an unknown time and we don't actually know where or when Dr. Barnes acquired it but I might want to think about its symbolism and look in terms of first of other lamps and then what it's iconographic elements between the turtle, the man, the dragon and the oroboros what they might what they all might mean together. So to look at lamps I tried very hard but could not find any very close analogues to ours and certainly non-identical but it does seem to be echoing imitating the forms of older oil lamps such as this Byzantine one oh and I should have noted by the way that generally they would have burned olive oil it seems where this one likewise has a stand in this case it stands on a tripod and then we've got this sort of receptacle I suppose for catching spilled oil we've got the main body of the lamp and then on top of it we have this little canopy on its lid you can see the hinge for it to go like up and down right over here and it looks just like the kind of canopy you'd find over an altar in a Byzantine church and indeed you might notice as well this Christian cross back here and so maybe this lamp would have been used in church rituals in Byzantium and symbolically it could refer to say the leading spiritual light of Christ such as we saw in that picture of the transfiguration at the barns and I also was very happy to learn that strangely shaped lamps were no rarity and while we don't see other combinations of you know dragons and men and auroboroi I found that the Romans had a particular predilection for foot shaped lamps as we see here where the vessel is shaped as a foot in a sandal and then the strap of the sandal becomes a nozzle and we've got this bird kind of cosily resting at the top here and so I suppose that we have kind of we're seeing history of shaped lamps maybe for just pleasure maybe for symbolism and so with that having been said I'd like to think a little bit more closely about the potential symbolism of ours so starting with the auroboros actually this motif of a serpent eating its own tail it was something that seems to have originated in Egypt first known instance actually on the tomb of King Tut to symbolize the cyclical nature of time of the seasons of rebirth renewal and as it passed through say Greek mythology for instance got to be kind of again more broadly conceived in terms of say repetition or later the eternal return and within the practice and practice in theory of alchemy as a kind of predecessor to chemistry that kind of tried to harness the forces of nature in order to overcome them say in for instance in the process of turning baser materials into that proverbial cold that the auroboros could be associated with the patterns of material change and so we've got the alchemist over here working away in his lab he has this big glass alchemical vessel that's on fire to precipitate the change and then right in here we've got the rather I think annoyed looking auroboros in this case a dragon eating its own tail and its self-breathing fire and then over here I'm going to show you another very similar picture where we've got in this case the auroboros is a snake again in fire telling us that this is the sublimation phase of chemical change and then I did find as well something I'd not realized that the auroboros would show up in Hindu mythology and here is a picture of the Hindu conception of the structure of the cosmos where I wanted to bring this in because as you can see it features a turtle as the base of the cosmos on which we see say elephants and then the dome of the earth with other strata up here like clouds and then the entire thing is surrounded by the auroboros and I think it is less likely maybe that whoever kind of cobbled together our lamp was making reference to say Hindu mythology but I suppose you just can't know but to go with that to think about it even if it is really kind of our own interpretation to think of it at the barns all right so there we are again in the gallery and so if we're looking at our lamp you know just maybe we've got some kind of comment on the alchemical process driven by human beings harnessing the forces of nature in order to create chemical change using say the forces of fire and light and I think that given barns's aesthetic stance on metalwork as well as his background as a chemist I think he would have particularly would have particularly appreciated that kind of interpretation and to close I'm going to read you a passage from an aesthetic writing on the art of metalworking that barns may well have been familiar with and I think certainly would have agreed with regardless and so this is called on the preeminent dignity of the arts of fire written by a Frenchman named Paul Valerie and so Valerie wrote among all the arts I know of non more adventurous more uncertain and thus more noble than the arts that invoke fire that they impose under the most dramatic aspect close combat between man and form their essential agent fire is also the greatest enemy no sooner had man tamed fire subjugated its heat and threw it metal creating tools arms and utensils than he diverted it to shape for himself objects of contemplation and pleasure and so you know with all that said I hope that this lamp today has um has brought you contemplation and hopefully pleasure as well so thank you so much for watching and that's it for today's takeout I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the barns foundation I hope you enjoyed barns 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 barns foundation