 Hi everybody, welcome to another barns 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 few minutes hanging out with you guys in gallery number four, which is on the first floor of the foundation. We can see that in front of us right here. It's a really great little gallery. There's a lot of different kinds of objects on display here from furniture to metal work to paintings on different kinds of materials. There's different subject matters, all being kind of mixed up together in what Dr. Barnes called ensembles. So let's look at this ensemble for just a second before we dive into the small little painting of St. Nicholas that we'll look at in a second. So the ensemble has some European furniture like the stool in the corner, a little American bench here in the center, a really great 18th or 19th century Qing dynasty painting on silk of some women in a library, which we'll come back to an 18th century French painting of a young girl, a little kind of Northern Renaissance portrait up here, another Renaissance Northern Renaissance copy by a copy of a work by an artist named Albrecht Doer. We've got this kind of later gothic work up here. And then this really wonderful painting by Peter Paul Rubens. If we continue over the door is a really fabulous picture by the artist Canaletto from the 18th century. And then we've got another kind of late gothic Italian painting over here of the Virgin and Child. But the picture that I want to spend some time looking at is this little tiny one right here that's right next to the door. So let's zoom in. And you can see it's positioned on the wall between some kind of a probably a keyhole cover called the sketch in and then a little kind of shovel up above. So let's look at that picture. Here it is. And what we are seeing here is a small little painting that was painted in the sometime in the 17th century, somewhere in Greece. We don't know exactly where, but we do know that it was made somewhere in Greece or in the Greek speaking world because of the inscription that we see at the top on either side of the figure's head. The title that we give to this work is St. Nicholas. And that's what that inscription actually says. Let's zoom in so we can actually see that a little bit better. So you can see here those of you who might be able to read Greek might be able to read that this says Oh Agios. And then on the other side it says Nicolaus. So we are looking at Oh Holy or Oh St. Nicholas is what is being written here. We've got this large halo around St. Nicholas's head. He's wearing a really kind of elaborately patterned outfit. He has one hand up holding his hand in sort of an interesting gesture. His outer garment, which kind of looks like a cape, along with this large, really kind of long tailed scarf that has three crosses on it, singles him out as being a priest. And we know that St. Nicholas not only was he a priest, but the historical St. Nicholas was the bishop of a city in what is modern day Turkey. So in ancient Asia Minor, a place called Myra. When we look at the outer garment, I mentioned the pattern that we have there. So what's most noticeable I think on first glance is this kind of black grid like pattern that sort of looks almost like a net that kind of casts over the sort of cape like garment that he's wearing. If we zoom in, what we can see is that we have representations of folds, of fabric folds here, right? And I think you guys can probably see that. Here's some as well down here. But the fabric itself has this pattern or is represented to have this black pattern sort of overlaid on it and it doesn't really conform to those folds that we see in the drapery. So there's some kind of visual disconnect here from reality and what is being depicted. In his other hand, he is holding up a book and you can see it's got these straps on the sides that are meant to help keep it closed because books like these would have been made out of animal skins in kind of by the 17th century, which we're talking about here. The front of it has a sort of gold and gem encrusted. You can see gemstones that are represented in the corners. These white dots are probably meant to be representative of pearls. So we're seeing a very elaborate book here. That book is probably meant to represent the Gospels or part of the New Testament. And so this is an icon that was made in what we call the post Byzantine period. So Byzantium as a sort of empire really collapsed in the 15th century. And after that, you still have artists, Greek speaking artists, making these types of paintings in the so-called Byzantine style. And so the Byzantine style is very well known for the kind of elongated forms, long fingers, sometimes smallish heads or sort of out of proportion bodies. And I think we can all see that here. If we return back to this hand gesture here, we can see that he has his hand up and this is generally referred to as a gesture of blessing. It's very specifically related to the Christian idea of the Trinity, which is representative of the three fingers that are held open. And then the two fingers that touch, the thumb and the ring finger that touch, are meant to symbolize the two natures of Christ. So this is all a kind of Christian theological kind of shorthand symbol that we have with this gesture of blessing. And St. Nicholas is not the only saint that is depicted making gestures of blessing. You see Christ doing it. You see other saints doing it as well in other depictions. Now, when we look at his face, you can see that the artist here, who we don't know exactly who it was, perhaps it was a monk, we see that the artist here has rendered this face in kind of a greenish cast. You can see the sort of greenish cast on the neck below. And you may have even noticed it on the hands here and the fingertips here as well. That greenish cast is sort of the first layer of painting that these artists would use to kind of stain the painting surface. And then they would paint other layers on top. So they built up the highlights from a darker base. And you can see that, again, when we zoom in here and we look at his face, you can see that these areas of this lighter color have been applied on top of that darker color. And while to us it might look a little strange, what it's meant to do is give a sense of modeling or of three-dimensional quality. He's got a small mouth, sort of long aquiline nose, which is very characteristic of the Byzantine style. And you can see that his eyes are not looking out at us. They're looking kind of off to the side, which is a really curious aspect of some Byzantine-style icons. And I was actually chatting with a friend and colleague of mine named Shannon Steiner, who is a professor of art history at Binghamton University and a specialist in later Byzantine art. And she and I were talking about these kind of side-eye, these cast glances that you see in a lot of these icons from the later period. And they can be sort of strange, and there's no consensus as to exactly what's going on there. Maybe his sort of sideways glance is meant to get us to look in that direction. And we know that sometimes icons like this would be part of a much larger ensemble of religious icons. And so maybe he's wanting us to look to another part of the icon display, or maybe it has something completely else to do with it. One of the things that's interesting about these icons is that they were meant to be conduits to the divine world. So you would pray to St. Nicholas through a representation like this, and then St. Nicholas would then is believed by the believer to relay those messages onto the divine world. Also, when we zoom in really closely, and it's so great to look at this object in such great detail, you can see that there are three holes here. One here, one here, and then one at, oops, one at the top up there. And those three holes are the remnants of what could have been a metal revetment or a metal kind of halo that would have been added to the exterior of this at some point during this object's history. We don't know what happened to it. We don't know exactly what it looked like, but we do know that that is something that that was present on Byzantine icons from this kind of later period like we're talking about here. Now, if we zoom out and return back to the ensemble and try to figure out how it fits into this whole world that is on display here, one of the things that I really find so kind of sort of mesmerizing about this little icon is that hand gesture. I find it to be something that always draws my eye. And it's something that I have noticed when I look across this ensemble, the kind of use of these dynamic hand gestures that we have. So here in this painting by Peter Paul Rubens, we've got the archangel Michael swooping in at the annunciation to the Virgin Mary. You can see this dynamic use of these gestures. We have the gestures of the symbols down below gesturing upwards. And even into a painting that has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, this Qing dynasty Chinese painting on silk, we can see that there's this really delicate gesture being represented by the standing woman who's wearing the kind of gray garment. And she's inside some it's just referred to as interior scene. We don't know who the artist is. But there is an emphasis on this gesture. We get the sense that maybe she is asking to see an object, one of these pieces of writing that are on the shelves behind her in the sort of maybe it's a library. Again, we're not totally sure. And so when we think about these works that are on display in gallery four, often I've chatted with people and they'll say, oh, well, we're in the religious room now. And I'll say no, not necessarily what Dr. Barnes is wanting us to think about is not necessarily religion, but how artists are representing the world around them and doing so in different ways. So we can see that with our little Saint Nicholas icon here. And we can see that in our representation by this Qing dynasty artist here. So I would encourage you when you come back to the barns and we all go back to the barns, go into a gallery like gallery number four and try to find some of these connections. We're all going to have something different that we see. So thank you for joining me today. I hope you've enjoyed our little little chat and join us for another Barnes takeout. Thanks. Take care.