 Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. My name is Kaylyn Jewel, I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend a little bit of time in gallery number 16 up on the second floor. This is a very busy gallery, as you can see by this view of the east wall, and it's a gallery that is extremely eclectic, which is a sort of funny thing to say, given that many of the galleries at the Barnes Foundation are just filled with objects from all over the world, all different time periods, all different kinds of materials, and we can see that on display in front of us right now. The object I want to focus on for our discussion today is this small head here of a woman. And before we do that, let's just sort of orient ourselves to this ensemble. So the ensemble is filled with objects from all different time periods and all different geographical locations. We've got some American furniture down here. We've got some ancient Egyptian objects here. We've also got some ancient Greek objects like this little vase right here. And if we zoom in, you can see we've got Navajo jewelry on display. We've got some medieval manuscripts. We've got some Persian manuscripts, paintings by American painters, the metal work, all kinds of stuff. So let's get a little bit closer to this lovely little head here. So here we go. So this is an object that doesn't really have a title. We don't know who the artist is. It was made sometime during the Roman Empire, probably in the first or second century AD. And it's an image of a woman. It's a little bit hard to discern who it depicts. It's certainly not a portrait of an individual, but it could be an image of a goddess. And we know that it probably is an image of a goddess given the distinctive hairstyle, which is pretty fabulous. This hairstyle where her hair is kind of divided into two sections. It's tied into a bow on top of her head. The rest of it sort of pulled back into a loose bun in the back that is sort of gently knotted, which we'll see in a second. I'll show you some, we'll look at some images of the sides in the back in a second. But let's zoom in to see some of the work that this ancient sculptor did. It's made out of marble. And we can see here a little bit of the hair kind of poking out on the side. You can see these areas here have been carved, not with a chisel, but were carved with a drill. And we see these here, here, and here. So an ancient drill was used by this Roman sculptor to create this image. So who is she? It's very likely that it's a representation of the Roman goddess Venus, who was the goddess of love. It seems sort of funny to say that though, because it's just an image that we just have the head, we don't have the rest of the body. But we do have other examples of this type of sculpture with this distinctive hairstyle. And notice the kind of the turn of her head. And it's not unlike the images from the ancient world like we see here. And this is an example of an image of Venus. It's called the Capital Line Venus. It's at the Capital Line Museums in the city of Rome. And it was discovered in the 16th century on an ancient plot of land that had been a villa during the Roman Empire. And all of these copies of images that we see of Venus, and you again notice the distinctive hairstyle up here, right? And her head is tilted. And this is one of the most famous images of Venus from the ancient world. And all of these Roman copies, whether it is the image we are looking at on the screen right now that is in Rome, or the one that we have at the Barnes Foundation. And so here's a view from another side. And let's look at the other side and the back. And these are all representations, they're all copies, I should say, of that ancient sculpture, which was originally made in Greece by a sculptor named Prec Sitalis. And Prec Sitalis carved the sculpture out of Perian marble, so a very fine-grained, kind of sparkly type of white marble. And he made it for the island of Canidos, which is in Greece. And they had a, there was a whole sanctuary. An architectural complex was built around the sculpture, around the original sculpture made by Prec Sitalis in the 4th century BC. And it was so popular, this ancient image of Venus, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, that it was visited by people from all over the Mediterranean. And it became a sort of tourist destination for people wanting to see this image of Venus. And why it was so interesting is because it was one of the first, probably the first representation of the goddess in the nude. Before this there had been plenty of images in the ancient Greek world of nude men, and they're sort of heroic nude guys. But it was the first time that anybody had seen an image of a Greek goddess in the nude. So when we think about it within the context, so our copy that we have here, which was made by a Roman sometime in the 1st or 2nd century, when we think about it within the context of the foundation, and we think about all of the other objects that are on display in this ensemble. And of course, we understand that Dr. Barnes is wanting us to look at these objects in terms of their formal qualities. So that distinctive tilt of her head that you can see is something that you can sort of pick out. One of the things that I noticed when I look at this ensemble is that you can pick it out in other images on display on this wall. And we'll just look at two of them very quickly. So here we have a 14th century German manuscript. So it's from the Middle Ages. And notice the distinctive turn of the head of Christ here who is showing his wound in an image that is referred to as Christ as the man of sorrows. We can see that here. And then if we look at another image that is displayed just in this same area, we can see another medieval manuscript page also from 14th century Germany. And we've got the Virgin Mary here holding the Christ child in her lap. And notice when we zoom in that we have that sort of distinctive head tilt. It's not as exaggerated as we see in the image of Christ, but it is still there. And then also I'd like to point your attention to the hair that's sort of cascading around her shoulders and her head. It's not unlike our image of Venus down here, which we see here again. So when we are all back at the barns, I would encourage you to venture into Gallery number 16 and take a moment to look at all of these objects, whether they are ancient or medieval or modern and try to see some visual connections between them. It's always a fun thing to try to do. And Dr. Barnes would really like it if we tried to do that. So thanks for joining me today. I hope you've enjoyed looking at this fabulous ancient sculpture. And be sure to join us for another Barnes Takeout. Thanks, take care. Thanks to the 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.