 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette, I'm a collections researcher. Today we're headed into room number four to look at this little painting. I had a music making angel by Italian artist Gerardo Stonina done in the early 1400s and before we take a deeper dive into this painting, as always I like to try and situate it within the context of its wall ensemble that Dr. Barnes himself had created and so he tended to arrange these really just on formal terms and so something that perhaps you might see is how its gold background is kind of echoed in this golden brass plaque of the baptism done a little bit later perhaps in Italy or even some of the other metal works like the andirons down here. Perhaps you might even see the circular shape of the halo echoed down there and maybe even comparing say Florentine Italian traditions of painting to Northern European ones as we see here for example here over here and likewise this work that we talked about both of these works earlier in the summer how this 20th century American artist Charles Prindergast used late medieval Italian methods in order to create his own quasi-spiritual panel paintings and so there are as always a billion ways to interpret these sorts of ensembles and those are just a few that I might see. So let's go in a little bit closer here's our angel and I'm always so excited to talk about music making angels because it was the depiction of angel musicians in medieval sacred art was the topic of my dissertation several years ago and so what we've got we've got an angel just the bust he has curly blonde hair and I say he just for convention because angels technically were bodyless didn't have any sort of gender were totally ineffable but you can see he's got rosy cheeks eyes looking up to his proper left mouth is open you can guess probably singing because he's holding a medieval version of a violin over here we can see one section of a pink wing right here a gold background and some of the gold has faded away so you can see that sternina would have applied the gold leaf over this red bolt to give the gold greater like warmth and vibrancy and the halo was stamped out of this gold so that you can imagine say if you had candles set up in front of this panel painting how the gold would catch the light and flicker and kind of animate it and then we have these blue shapes over here this kind of long curved one these wispy ones and the probably the dimensions as well as the presence of these shapes tell us that our angel is not a standalone picture in itself but rather a fragment of a larger whole and so in talking thinking about this painting I really like to take it in some ways as a meditation on the art historical fragment where how do we get from this piece on display in this context at the barns to a meaningful historical home so part of this involves establishing who the artist was and this is a long process worked out by connoisseurs somewhere between 50 and 100 years ago and it's partly on the basis of comparative images like this scene of the Madonna and child enthroned surrounded by angels and saints that you can see another angel that looks so very similar to our own albeit on a smaller scale if you just want to compare for a sec and then thinking about what kind of subject matterers would have belonged to you can see the shapes of ours at the barns let's go back again for a sec here here are part of a mandorla or a heavenly body halo and clouds that often surrounded again subjects such as the virgin the virgin Mary the Madonna and child enthroned or in a kind of heavenly aspect and both of these image types you might be able to tell both celebrate virgin Mary as the human mother of the infant Christ who was willing incarnation of him was so meaningful for human salvation to the extent that she was rewarded as being crowned queen of heaven and so it's both this earthly incarnational scene as well as one that exists in the realm of heaven straddling heaven and earth at the same time so we're starting to get a little bit closer we've got the artist we've got Starnina and we've got a probable subject matter but to think a little bit more about the artist just for a teeny bit of context there um part of part of what we know about Starnina on the testimony both of um a 16th century biographer and artist named Georgia named Georgia Vasari who was um good friends with Michelangelo for instance said that um Starnina was from Florence but he spent sometime in late 1300s being active in Spain including at say Toledo Cathedral in this chapel of St. Blaise and in other places like Valencia so here he was important for um both for encountering the like in some ways what you might call an apex of the international gothic style elegant abstracted that he was then able to transmit back to Florence but there with some of the um some of the like artistic idioms he'd picked up in Italy like a certain three-dimensionality in terms of depicting bodies and um architectural settings ended up impacting even some artists that were active um in Spain and represented at the barns like um Miguel Alcanius whose presentation in the temple scene you can see down here so there's a bit more about Starnina but he did return to Florence and um and at the end of the 1300s and started building up a body of work over there and so once um people were figuring out who Starnina was what he painted um what fragments of his were associated with one another we start to get closer to an identification um for um for the context of our music making angel and you can see here it shows up in a publication by Bernard Berenson a major connoisseur of Italian art early Italian art this one written in 1963 and you can see in this case it's not quite yet been attributed to Starnina but he has pulled together a bunch of fragments um stylistically dimensionally that belong with each other and figures that it belongs to a chapel of St. Lawrence um at the Florence Cathedral and he proposed this because this is St. Lawrence over here identified he may be able to make out by the grill which we call his attribute on which he was martyred um back in the middle of the 200s in the city of Rome according to his legend and so in many ways it's plausible and certainly these fragments belong with each other but um in 1974 a scholar called um Jean von Wynnwin went and measured and found out that these fragments fit with each other but were too big to fit in any of these chapels in the Florence Cathedral and started to search for alternative proposals for it and actually again in um in Georgia Vasari's Lives of the Artists published in the middle of the 1500s realized that a description of um of a painting attributed to um Fra Angelico which will get to in a sec matched what um matched these fragments that Berenstein had already assembled and was able then to attribute it actually to the patronage of Cardinal Angelo Achaiololi who's depicted over here at the margins of a missile that also he commissioned and says um in its callathon in the beginning that it was for him and so it's the same Cardinal that you're able to see over here and he commissioned it for this lady chapel or chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary at the Cretosa or um Charter House of Florence which had been founded by his his father and he was buried in this chapel and so this is a ground plan where it would have been and this is a just I think a gorgeous external view of it in I should say Galuzzo just outside Florence and so let's then look at the description of um that um Van Wadenoyen had found in Vasari and see how it matches up with Berenstein's fragments and more so here we go so this is a passage that she matched up the fragments with it says um in Vasari again just to reiterate for the fifth time um one of the first works in painting wrought by this good father Vasari thinking for Angelico but really Gerardo Starnina was a panel in the Cretosa of Florence which was placed in the principal chapel in which panel is an Adono with the child in her arms and with certain very beautiful angels at her feet there we go sounding instruments and singing at the sides are St. Lawrence here we are again you see his grill better St. Mary Magdalene um what Vasari had said was St. Zinobius but actually St. Hugh of Lincoln another Cartesian that you can tell by his white robes St. Benedict the founder of Western Monasticism and in the Pradella our little stories of these saints here again um is St. Lawrence wrought in little figures with infinite diligence and so with that um with matching up the the fragments which I think I had mentioned um were fragmented largely in the early 1800s um under Napoleon um and textual cues and other um other pictures by similar artists for comparison eventually you can come upon um a much fuller reconstruction and so this is something that I pulled together last year 2019 on the basis of the um 13 surviving fragments of this altarpiece which are here at the Barnes and then in 11 different institutions both in America and Europe um both public and private collections and so and the background that I've used here maybe you can um maybe you can see is the picture I showed at the beginning of the Virgin Mary with the child's interlap surrounded by the mandorilla to try and match up ours and then um above you can see you know Christ in heavenly glory up here holding the sphere of the cosmos in his hand kind of flanked by the enunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary to speak to her role in human salvation so once you have kind of this assembly of fragments into most of the altarpiece that Starnina had painted in Visari had described how do you put it in its like original functional context and so here's um another work of art as it were that I did um this is we're looking at the inside of the Lady Chapel here are the choir stalls um this is where the high altar would have been and please note that this um reconstruction as it were is totally impressionistic and just to give you I guess really an impression of what it's um architectural envelope it's million but it's been and note as well that Visari said there are other paintings of um of the Virgin the Core Nation her with two saints and so here you'd be performing the mass and here's the missile um with the rubrics and red for that you'd also as the Cartesian monk been singing the out be singing the hours of the divine office and um part of the person benefiting would be after all the soul of Cardinval Acioli here who again was buried in this chapel but the idea was that the liturgy of the church that these monks were celebrating were celebrated in parallel by the angels and saints in heaven in sort of hope of eventual restitution to say your celestial niches in the choir of heaven and to get back just to a sec of the music of of angels um I mentioned that angels were ineffable and silent but scriptural interpretation of say books like Isaiah um who gave the the seraphim which are the highest order of the nine different ranks of angels lead to the cosmic um hymns of praise with the holy holy holy and then you have the Psalms in which we've got all of creation praising the Lord from the heaven praise with all the angels praising all the heavenly hosts the sun the moon the stars um and then creation and then we've got praise happening with musical instruments all of this is a vindication of giving instruments to the angels to pull together um secular and sacred praise in truly cosmic praise that originated um with the angels around the immediate throne of God as in Isaiah and repercussed on through everybody um hoping that everybody who participated would eventually be joining angels such as ours um up in heaven and 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 Barnes Foundation I hope you enjoyed barn's 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