 Good morning everyone. I'm Michael Ligia from the University of Pennsylvania, and let me just thank Martha and the Barnes for the wonderful new dynamism and openness of the orientation of this institution. It's really contributed so much to the to the art historical landscape of the city. So bravo. It's my pleasure to introduce Raimi Meis, who's just finishing her second year in the PhD program at Penn. She's specializing in the art of the United States, especially the Civil War period. Her dissertation proposal has not been formulated yet, but we're eagerly awaiting the shape of that. She has a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she had highest honors and the Chancellor's Award. Also an MA from the Courtauld Institute in London, where her degree was awarded with distinction. Then she spent two years as the Ann Lunder Leland Curatorial Fellow at the Colby College Museum of Art, where she curated and assisted with several exhibitions. She's already published a number of essays. Two, one of them co-authored, are about to appear very soon in the catalog for the exhibition that's opening at Penn's Ross Gallery tonight, the exhibition called the World on View of Expositions, World Spheres from the late 19th century. She has an essay forthcoming in the Rutgers Art Review and another on Whistler and Fashion was published in the catalog of the Lunder collection of Whistler's work at Colby. Raimi's paper today grew from a seminar, a seminar paper in a seminar on relics, pilgrimage, and material culture in medieval art, led by Professor Sarah Gannara. And so the title of her paper, it's not yet showing, is the very form and mold cast relics of Abraham Lincoln's face and hands. Raimi. Thank you so much, Michael, for that introduction and for your continued support and guidance. And thank you so much, Professor Guerra, for your support of this paper. That was a wonderful adventure between medieval and modern modes of viewing. And thank you to the Department of the University of Pennsylvania, all of the faculty there have been so supportive. And for this amazing event today, thank you to the Barnes Foundation. On March 31st, 1860, Abraham Lincoln, waded in the studio of Leonard Wells' bulk as a plaster mold hardened around his face and head. Little by little, the plaster assumed the imprint of his defining features, high cheekbones, conspicuous nose and prodigious ears, along with the more intimate aspects, such as the wrinkles across his forehead, the deeply etched nasolabial folds, down even to the delicate texture of his pores and eyebrows. After one hour, Volk struggled to remove the mold. In a published recollection of the process in 1881, the sculptor admitted that, quote, it clung pretty hard as the cheekbones were higher than the jaws at the lobe of the ear. Lincoln bent his head low and took hold of the mold and gradually worked it off without breaking or injury. It hurt a little as a few hairs of the tender temples pulled out with the plaster and made his eyes water, end quote. A short while later, Volk would also furnish those same hands which had successfully detached the life mask with casts of their own. The distinctive casts elicited profound emotional reactions in those who encountered them. Even Lincoln, upon viewing the finished life mask, supposedly exclaimed, there is the animal himself. Their value grew immeasurably following the president's murder by John Wilkes Booth on April 14th, 1865. Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was the first to perish by assassination. The notorious event, which transpired five days after the conclusion of the Civil War, shook the Union to its core. Out of the ensuing anger and grief, Lincoln emerged as a kind of martyr or saint, thoroughly Christ-like. Many construed Lincoln's death as the ultimate sacrifice and the key to the country's sanctification. The Christian dimensions of Lincoln's historical persona found a symbolic compliment in George Washington and the two were often biblically interpolated by authors and artists, with Washington construed as the creator and Lincoln the redeemer of the young nation. An 1865 mezzotint print by John Sartain, entitled Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr Victorious, renders this cultural fantasy in grandiose detail. Lincoln is pictured at the moment of his arrival to the celestial landscape of heaven, where Washington and a host of angels welcome him to eternal life. Although Lincoln's life mask and hand casts fell from public view for a time, they later resurfaced in the home of the artist Wyatt Eaton in 1887. Douglas Volk, Leonard's son, had entrusted them to Eaton some years before. Augusta St. Gauden's instantly recognized and capitalized on their invaluable status as candid indexes of Lincoln's likeness in his Chicago monument, Abraham Lincoln, the man. It was also St. Gauden's who amplified the cast's influence through the manufacture of a series of bronze replicas. A significant motivating force behind the acquisition of these copies was the common belief that Lincoln was divined through Volk's mask and casts. For example, Lawrence Hutton, a prolific collector of life and death masks, of which the collection is actually housed at Princeton, testifies to such reverence in this observation regarding his personal Lincoln mask. Quote, I have watched many an eye fill while looking at it for the first time. To many minds it has been a revelation, and I turn to it myself more quickly and more often than to any of the others when I want comfort and help. He continues, what Whittier wrote to James T. Fields of the Marshall engraving of Lincoln may be said of the life cast. It contains the informing spirit of the man within, end quote. Loretta Taft took this notion a step further. In a published interview, the sculptor opined, quote, there is something human or shall I say superhuman about it. One stands before it and feels himself in the presence of America's soul. It is clear that to numerous observers, including myself, these objects possessed a dense aura of vitality or an effective power which thickened over the course of their trajectory and proliferation. Lincoln's historical significance coupled with his posthumous attainment of a Christ-like identity as a martyr for liberty is essential to the cast's numinous verb. The actual and imagined characteristics of the cast's outline thus far, their palliative emotive effects, their endowment with Lincoln's spirit or soul, and their physical manifestation of his touch all evoke the hallmarks of holy relics. Cynthia Hahn defines the relic as, quote, a physical object understood to carry the weirdtuce of a saint or Christ, literally virtue but more accurately power of a holy person, end quote. To be specific, these casts align less with Hahn's conception of a primary relic, bones or other body parts of a sacred individual, and instead resemble more closely the tertiary relic, an object that has touched a relic and carries the transferred or contagious weirdtuce. This paper will posit the Lincoln casts as such, as contact relics, and will establish the interpretive potential of such a devotional categorization. Indeed, by situating these objects between medieval and modern modes of viewing, it will become clear that the bronze series made after Volk's casts, as the progeny of the original life molds, afforded an effective authenticity for subsequent sculptures of Lincoln in the 19th and 20th centuries. Together, the casts arrest Lincoln's clean-shaven carriage and sturdy hands, poised at the brink of his presidency and all that came after, the duress of the Civil War, the deliveries of the Gettysburg address in the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as his eventual assassination and cultural apotheosis. It may be said, therefore, that the casts capture the soon-to-be-presidents' dynamic potentiality in material form. The vivid immediacy of the mask enhances its impact, revealing Lincoln's facial attributes and startling the graphic clarity, such as the tender veins at his temples, the harsh scarge the lower left of his mouth, and the curvature of cartilage in his ears. The oddly-shaped, rough-hewn cavities over the eyes are the result of openings left in the plaster, so as not to disturb the sitter's eyesight during the molds' hardening process. A photograph of Lincoln, taken in the same year as the cast, testifies to the force of these features, all of which compose a striking and idiosyncratic facial landscape. Volk took the casts of Lincoln's hands on May 19th, 1860, the day after the politician received the Republican nomination. The condition of his right hand bore discernible testimony to this coincidence. Volk observed that it was, quote, swollen as compared with the left on account of excessive handshaking the evening before, end quote. In order to mitigate the hands' inflamed appearance, the sculptor requested that Lincoln grasp some kind of thin object. The item which can be seen clenched between the fingers in the plaster cast is the top portion of a broom handle, which Lincoln selected, cut, and whittled smooth for this very purpose. The hand casts equal the mask in their uncanny conservation of superficial markings. Lincoln's scar, the gossamer webs of skin between his fingers, and the sharp knuckles and protuberant veins, all are registered in the plaster in forensic detail. On April 24th, 1865, Lincoln's funeral train arrived at City Hall in Manhattan, the fifth stop of a procession that would conclude an Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois on May 4th, a full 20 days after the assassination. Augusta St. Gaudens, then just 17, joined the seemingly interminable line, intent on paying his last respects. The sculptor recalled how the experience proved so captivating that it warranted a repeat visit, quote, I saw Lincoln lying in state, and I went back to the end of the line to look at him again, end quote. 19 years later, the memory of this forceful visual encounter would assume a pressing relevance. In 1884, St. Gaudens received a $40,000 commission from the Chicago Lincoln Memorial Fund for what would become his widely celebrated Standing Lincoln monument. During the summer and fall of 1865, the artist marshaled as many relevant source materials as possible. Photographic portraits of Lincoln, a live model of Lincoln's own size and proportions, speeches and publications by the late president, his own personal recollections, and significantly, the life casts by Volk. One of the first sculptors to draw upon these artifacts, St. Gaudens made extensive use of their intimate anatomy for his own work. Diana Strasdies has even proposed that the necessarily relaxed facial features of Lincoln's mask may have encouraged the contemplative attitude for the developing figure of Lincoln. Rather than position Lincoln in a declamatory state, St. Gaudens elected to present to him standing before a ceremonial, chlisma-style chair of state, head bowed, right hand in a soft fist behind his back, the other gripping his lapel. The sculpture captures Lincoln in the quiet thought-gathering pause, perhaps weighing his words before a public address. Following its ceremonial unveiling and dedication on October 22, 1887, St. Gaudens' Standing Lincoln was met with an outpouring of critical accolades, securing itself as a paradigm of Lincoln's statuary. A resounding refrain emerged amidst this approving chorus, one which held this sculptor's authentic likeness as the defining feature and in highest esteem. The art critic Mariana Griswold van Renslayer, for example, found the pose, quote, simple, natural, individually characteristic, as far removed from the conventionally dramatic as from the boldly commonplace. Neither physical facts nor facts of costume are palliated or adorned. What we see are realities, suffused with poetic thought, and it ennobled, though not altered, by the subtle touch of art, end quote. The Chicago Daily Tribune pronounced that, quote, the counterfeit presentment was indeed Abraham Lincoln and concluded that the entire aspect is so like the man, so devoid of artifice or paltryness that, in spite of the homely features, it becomes majestic, end quote. Such incomians speak to the driving force behind the sculpture's exceptionality for 19th century audiences. Its powerful resemblance and authenticity afforded and corroborated not only by two-dimensional media, such as photographs in the engraving previously mentioned, but also and crucially by Volk's three-dimensional life molds. For period viewers, the monuments' majesty, even its sanctity, is an explicit byproduct of its verism, and in this way St. Goudin's established a precedent. Since the erection of his standing Lincoln at Chicago in 1887, many, perhaps nearly all, of the sculptors have had the advantage of the use of that famous mask. In other words, Volk's direct impressions of Lincoln's visage and hands provided the blueprints, so to speak, for an astonishingly wide variety of sculptural manifestations, from the iconic Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. by Daniel Chester French to Abraham Lincoln, another standing bronze in Cincinnati by George Gray Barnard. An evocative medieval topos will shed light on this point, especially in relation to the cast's ready provision of an original relic from which a multitude of referential objects and images stem and proliferate. Two artifacts of special authority were thought to represent the holy face of Christ during the incarnation, the cloth of Odessa or the Mandillion in the east, and the Veronica or Wera icon in the west. According to the earliest documentary text, the holy face was an impression of Christ's features on a veil or linen cloth, created directly by contact. Because Christ's body had ascended to heaven, no corporeal relics remained, thereby establishing the contact relics of the holy face, all the more precious and symbolically complex. These tertiary relics do not proffer an artistic likeness of Christ's face, they instead retain the outline of his countenance, not made with human hands, impregnated within the cloth. A remarkable trace which echoes the impression made in the original plaster mold and immortalized through the cast's of Lincoln. The venerable originals of the Mandillion and the Veronica, however, circulated primarily in the guise of copies and often as two-dimensional renderings. Nevertheless, these derivatives were regarded as legitimate and holy in their own right by virtue of an iconographical formula which visualized the existence of their ecclesiological referent. In general, as seen in Hans Memlings painting on panel, Christ's necklace head is depicted against a luminous white cloth held outspread in a loft by St. Veronica. The Mandillion and the Veronica boast an extraordinarily rich textual and iconographic history, but Gerard Wolf engages one particular aspect which has notable parallels in this study. According to Wolf, the western cult of the Veronica between the 14th and 16th centuries mobilized images of a new kind, not simply cult images, but images of another image. He explains, the face on the cloth is, as it were, a symbolic form or the imminent condition for this process. The original is a product of touch, but the artist who pictured the face of Christ certainly did not paint with sacramental blood, but rather in a mimetic act. The role of the original, transferred from Jerusalem to Rome, is that of a screen open to projections, which guarantees the transposition of the primordial touch into a visual contact offered by the copy. It may be said that the original in this case is fecund, spawning countless generations of equally impactful simulations. If the wearer icon is a screen open to projections, then the Lincoln cast themselves serve as molds from which new renditions of proportionate virtue may be made. As Harold Holzer has incisively pointed out, quote, few modern viewers realize that the marble hands grasping the throne-like chair of the Lincoln Memorial and the hand clutching the lapel in his great monument at Lincoln Park in Chicago owe their inspiration and their life-like detail to Wolf's pioneer castings. The casts live primarily in the work of many others, end quote. Each variation is indelibly tethered to and empowered by the cast originals. Their genealogy is indebted to the cast material substantiations of Lincoln's bodily presence and touch. Fragments of Lincoln's body and personal possessions, or Lincolniana, have widely been regarded and collected as conventional relics since the president's death over 150 years ago. For instance, Dr. Edward Curtis, while cleaning the surgical instruments used in Lincoln's autopsy, discovered a tiny splinter of bone from the president's head which had been driven into the brain by the bullet. Curtis immediately packaged the fragment and mailed it to his wife for safekeeping, and she became the proud possessor of the most eagerly pursued type of body relic in the Christian West since the fourth century, a sliver of the martyr's bone. This relic is now housed in the National Museum of Health and Medicine along with other precious remnants, the most visceral of which is undoubtedly the fatal bullet. As this study has shown, Lincoln's life mask and hand casts by Leonard Volk merit the same if not greater-held accreditation. The correlative interplay between 19th century and medieval material cultures engenders a more nuanced comprehension of the potency of these objects. In such an interpretation concretizes their place within an American relictual tradition. The original cast facilitated the dissemination and enlivenment of the very form and mold of Lincoln's likeness and to some degree his very presence long after his death. Thank you.