 I want to demonstrate an approach to looking at and analyzing a work of art called ORS. And ORS is an acronym which consists of observation, or what do we see, analysis, what does that tell us, reflection, what questions still remain, and synthesis, what can we conclude. And this is a process that you can follow when you look at an unfamiliar work of art, and it's also a good process to follow when you are writing about a work of art, for example for the paper at the end of the semester. Here we're looking at a really spectacular work of art that is an excellent example for using the ORS technique, particularly because the showcase of this chalice is an antique sardonic cup. So this is a work called the chalice of Abbot Sousje, or Sousje. It is an antique sardonic cup, so a cup made probably around the 1st or 2nd century CE. And that is set within a 12th century gold and jeweled setting that was modified later in the 17th century. But primarily we have the antique cup and this gold and jeweled setting. So in ORS one of the first things that we do is we make observations. So here we are observing that antique sardonic cup. Sardonics, it's a type of agate and it is called sardonics because it has inclusions of an orangish brown stone that is given the term sard. And so we see these patterns with the sard and with other colors. That's what makes this sardonics. You might also notice that the sardonics has been very carefully worked. It has these wonderful raised ridges that follow the shape of the cup and really call our attention to the beautiful banding and patterning on the stone that was used for the cup. So here the artist is really exploiting the natural material to show it to its greatest effect. Now if we look at the knob which is used to help carry this chalice and at the foot you can see that these are decorated with gold wire in really elaborate patterns. This is a technique called filigree and then we also have red gems. These are now glass replacements. They most likely replaced garnets but it's also possible that rubies were used but in this time period garnets are probably a bit more likely. There were also pearls and you can see those. And then down on the foot we have a series of stamped medallions. The one that you see at center shows Christ with a halo and his hand is raised in blessing. And flanking him on either side are grapes with a grape leaf and a sheaf of wheat. And the sheaf of wheat looks like it might have been a replacement when work was done on this in the 17th century. Now that we've made our observations about sort of the factual things we could see on this chalice now we're going to analyze them. So first we have three sort of main avenues of analysis that our observations have brought up. First is materials and their history, the function of this work and its iconography or meaning. One of the things we can do when we start to analyze materials is that we can look at comparable examples of these materials. And so here I'm showing you an antique sardonic cup in the Getty Villa. It and objects in a number of other museums are evidence that sardonics was particularly favored for drinking vessels in the antique period. So during classical Greek and Rome and particularly by the Romans who were great lovers of luxury goods. And here we see a property of the sardonics that wasn't visible in the photos that we've seen so far of our chalice. And that is the way that sardonics responds to light. You can see that portions of this stone which is a type of quartz are completely transparent. Other areas are translucent and there are varying levels of transparency and translucency. And so when light hits a vessel like this, it can glow and seem to be lit up by an inner fire from that sort of reddish orange sard stone. Here is a photo I took of the chalice when I went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. That's the collection that this piece is in. And you can see that like the antique cup in the Getty, this one also glows when it is hit with light. You can see those oranges in particular really, really glowing. So the sardonics was a luxury type of material that was particularly favored for drinking vessels and probably also prized for the effect that it had when hit with bright light. And now looking at the foot and at the knob, we can look into the symbolism of the other materials and the meaning of them. Red gems in Christian art generally are a reference to the blood of Christ. And pearls are often a metaphor for purity. And that could be the purity of someone like the Virgin Mary or the purity of her son Jesus Christ who had a virgin birth and was an innocent when he was sacrificed on the cross. The grapes and the wheat on either side of the figure of Christ on the base on the foot of this vessel are references to the wine and the bread. And these of course are the two substances that are eaten at communion at the celebration of the Eucharist, first to commemorate the Last Supper of Christ before he died and also as a metaphorical reenactment of Christ's sacrifice that the wine is his blood, the bread is his body and he sacrificed himself on behalf of mankind in order to save us from our sins. We also can analyze the function of this vessel and we know that a chalice is a particular type of vessel. It is the wine goblet, if you will, used for the wine in the Christian celebration of the Eucharist and the Eucharist is that reenactment of the Last Supper that I was just talking about. Now we start to reflect and we try to take some of those analytical points that we just made and see how they start to interrelate and also figure out if there are additional questions that we need to ask. So how does the preciousness of sardonyx work with the symbolism of purity and blood in the gems, the preciousness of the gold for the whole vessel, and then those themes of Christ's sacrifice and the Eucharist that we see on the foot? And how does this all relate to the function of this particular vessel? An additional question we might ask is, why would the patron of this work in the 12th century reuse an antique sardonyx cup? Well, we know that works from the Roman period were highly prized in the medieval period. They looked to Rome as the time period in which Christianity first formed as religion and they also looked back to Rome as a model for ways to organize and run an enormous empire. The church's own bureaucracy was based on Roman bureaucratic systems and many rulers in medieval Europe sought to bring back many of the good things of Rome and sort of create a Christian Roman empire in Europe. And so this antique sardonyx cup would have been valued for its ties to Rome and also for its preciousness. If we think about the visual properties of the sardonyx in addition to its preciousness, then we can also think about how that interacts with the contents. The wine, the blood of Christ, an incredibly precious substance for Christians is what goes into that cup. So it needs to be made of a substance that is worthy to hold the blood of Christ. And then also we have the effect that the dark wine would have on the stone itself. There would be a visual property of that wine darkening the areas where the cup is full. And so I think that that visual property and the preciousness would really enhance the viewer's experience. And of course the deeper meaning of the wine is that this is the blood of Christ in the sacrifice. Starting with our reflections, how do blood, purity, wine and bread relate to Christ? Well of course Christ was considered to be sort of the ultimate sacrificial lamb. There was a tradition for the Jews of sacrificing a young innocent animal so that in order to beg for forgiveness for people's wrongdoings and the innocence of that animal and the sort of the cruelty of the loss of that innocent life was part of the key for it because people had to feel sorrow that this innocent creature had died for them. And in the Christian tradition Christ takes on that role of pure innocent sacrificial lamb. And when Christians celebrate the Last Supper, particularly in the Catholic tradition, and that is what was being practiced in the time period we're talking about in the 12th century, the body and the blood of Christ, the wine was believed to miraculously transform into Christ's blood and similarly the bread in the mass was believed to transform into Christ's body. So these were the actual sacrifice being repeated at the altar. And so these themes relate to the chalice. Think about the incredible significance of this act of drinking the wine to remember not just the Last Supper of Christ prior to the crucifixion, but to commemorate his act of sacrifice and the preciousness of that blood within. And then of course the references to wheat on the chalice are meant to call our attention to the bread and thus the body of Christ in the mass as well. So one other question remains and this is something we haven't talked about yet. And this is the fact that we know that this chalice was made for a man named Abbot Souser or Abbot Souset. What do we know about this guy? Well he wrote three books about rebuilding and decorating his church, the Abbey Church of Sandinie just outside Paris and in that he talks about his love of really impressive works of treasure that he wanted for the church. And one of the things that he was particularly adamant about was that he wanted to be able to have the objects on the altar represent all of the stones that appear in the books of the Bible and precious stones appear in the Book of Ezekiel in particular and also in the Book of Revelation. And Souser boasts in his writings that he manages to have all but one of the stones mentioned in the Bible and the sardonyx happens to be one of those stones. And so for him it would have been an additional tie and beyond just this being a precious object for the mass that sardonyx would have been an additional tie to the tradition of the Bible. So synthesis is when we take all of these pieces and we put them together and I kind of jumped the gun with that with our last slide because I love this work so much and I think it is such a spectacular piece that embodies so many different ideas about luxury, about taste, about expense, about the value of antiques and of course all of the symbolism of Christ and the Eucharist and the sacrifice, all of this goes together in this single object. So the synthesis is really meant to be sort of the aha moment when you take all of these pieces and you use them to sort of construct this really interesting multi-valent understanding of the work that you're questioning and sometimes it takes a little while to get to this point. You may have to sort of go back and ask more questions, figure out if there's more research that you need to do and so that's also part of the ORS process and I urge you to try and apply this ORS process in your writing and in your approach to works when you are trying to figure out what you want to do for your class project paper.