 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barns Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher. Today we're going to head into room number 16 of the Barnes Foundation and it's a good thing that we're doing this digitally today because we're going to be looking at a very small image in the very edge of the display over here. Here we go. And of course we'll zoom in into the individual picture in just a second but it is a scene from a late medieval manuscript made about the year 1480 by the French royal court painter Jean Bordecau. And before we zoom in I'd like to note that it comes from the same manuscript a book of hours as its neighbor over here as well as we're going to zoom across the rest of the room as well as this scene over here of the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. And on this east wall of room number 16 it is grouped together with a whole bunch of things perhaps maybe especially this 20th century painting by American artist Charles Prendergast as an anchor of things ancient medieval modern not all seem to share a pretty similar formal vocabulary. So let's go on closer to our own particular image. Here we are. So again it is from a late medieval book of hours painted about 1480 by the court painter Jean Bordecau who worked in tour and he was a student of the workshop of the very famous painter also very famous painter Jean Fouquet. Let me show you a picture by Fouquet. This is here we go. Perhaps the strangest and completely magnificent marvelous image of the virgin and child. This is now an antwerp surrounded by these incredibly vibrant seraphim and cherubim that I guess look more or less to me like the balloon animals. I think just a limpid drool like rich details. So this is the workshop out of which he's coming. Let's go back. And the text was written by a scribe in Paris and it also actually seems like the ornament was made also in Paris by a third hand. So what probably was happening was the text was written out in Paris. The ornament added and then the whole was shipped off to tour for Bordecau to paint it and it is from a book of hours which is a prayer book for the lady modeled after the divine office that monks would celebrate and so images would go along with prayers that people would say at set hours through the day. Let's zoom on in the text for a second what you may be able to see to an extent here in this kind of reddish-purplish color says that you should pray it at the ninth hour and then in Latin the text essentially asks God for several times to lend some aid. And finally the scene that we're looking at is the presentation of the Christ child in the temple of Jerusalem on the 40th day after his birth by the Virgin Mary and his adoptive father Joseph over here who's holding a very big candle. And so this is an episode in the Gospel of Luke and what it says essentially is that the Virgin Mary is obeying Jewish laws where 40 days after birth when she's considered pure she goes into the temple for a purification right and also is supposed to dedicate the firstborn son to God. So that is what she's doing presenting him on an altar as if to God. And it's also prescribed that the new parents would bring a sacrifice of turtle doves in a basket so we see this lady over here holding the basket with doves. And also the Gospel of Luke tells that when the Virgin Mary and Joseph brought the Christ child to the temple the Holy Spirit led this old man Simeon who here appears in the guise of a priest in the temple where the monk back here is even seeming to hold his bishop's mitre recognizes him as the son of God as does actually this woman the one who's holding the basket an old prophetess named Anna who's been waiting something like 80 years in order to be able to see the son of God presented in the temple. And so on one level we see this image here presenting the historical Gospel on the account of the presentation but as you're able to see it's not really taking place in Jerusalem so much as in the space of a church although to be fair in order to kind of make it look ancient it seems that perhaps Bordecaum has made the interior look a bit like the ancient Pantheon in Rome which was by this time a church dedicated to Mary but kind of shows for the French interest in the Italian Renaissance interest in the classical world. But that aside we do have an altar draped with cloth that probably likewise was made in Italy as you'd see often in those days. We have Simeon looking like a priest or a bishop and then again we've got these monks in the background who certainly don't show up in the Gospel account do they but seem perhaps along with the lay person saying these prayers to be celebrating the liturgy in their own kind of realm and we certainly can't read the little book that they've got but perhaps it's got text that mirrors the text below this image and then likewise again we see Joseph here with his big old candle paper. Candlemas the presentation in the liturgical calendar was celebrated as candlemas you'd get your candles blessed for the year and it was a way of celebrating Christ bringing light back into the world and sometimes even this liturgical event would get folded into the blessing of the throats with candles because it's very close to the feast today of Saint Blaise who's a patron of throats. So we have this beautiful scene that's kind of has one foot in the Gospel history another foot in the liturgy both as it's practiced in church or you as a lay person might be in your own home or might be carrying this to church going through the devotion saying the prayers yourself occupying a kind of slice of liturgical time or ritual time and the images themselves are supposed to be a kind of like springboard or incitement into a sort of third layer of time which is mystical not in gospel history not in the liturgical present but celebrating the eternal liturgy in heaven and kind of full immersion with the divine and with that said I'd kind of like to take a sec to think about this beautiful and I think we can even say enchanting marginal ornament that surrounds our picture we've got these finds these tendrils with these gold leaves and buds flowers of different sorts red and blue we've got this I think not terribly intimidating man with the dragon's body a very cute endearing deer down here with bat's wings some of it some of these flowers are occupying these like lozens or triangle shapes others it's just sort of free flowing around in the space and medieval scholars of medieval art have proposed a number of ways to think about marginalia or decoration in the margins in medieval art but there's one scholar who's writing in the year 1942 named Henri Fouquillon that I think had a particularly lovely take on it and so I'm going to read you an excerpt of what he wrote just because I think it's such beautiful writing and so he Fouquillon said that ornament has its own existence um so it's not necessarily marginal to the main event and shapes its own environment to which it imparts a form it will follow the metamorphoses of this form if we'll study not merely its axes and armature but everything else that it may include in its particular framework then we'll see before us an entire universe partitioned off into an infinite infinite variety of blocks of space and the background will sometimes remain generously visible an ornament will be disposed in straight rows or quinquanxes sometimes however the ornament will multiply to prolixity and wholly devour the background in other words what I may call the system of the series a system composed of discontinuous elements sharply outlined strongly rhythmical and defining a stable and symmetrical space that protects them against unforeseen accidents of metamorphosis eventually becomes the system of the labyrinth which by means of mobile sympathies stretches itself out in a realm of glittering movement and color and so I love the thought that ornament itself has its own raison d'etre and defines its own realm that for you as a medieval viewer might be a place in which you can lose yourself in these prayers and really interface more with um with the mystical realm and so we've got a manuscript that kind of posits and divides up slices of time and space and I suppose I'll let you think what that means for you as a viewer to see this now on display in a room in a museum and also filtered into your own screen and so that is it for today's takeout and thank you so much for watching I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive 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