 One, welcome to Barnes Takeout. My name is Kaylen Jewell. I am a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. I wanted to wish everybody who was celebrating a Merry Christmas and because it is Christmas, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about an appropriately thematic painting that is in gallery number 15 on the second floor of the foundation. So we're looking at gallery 15, we're looking specifically at the North Wall. There have been lots of takeouts about lots of the ancient objects that are on display in this gallery by my colleagues. But what I wanted to talk about was this little painting here positioned on the left side of Barnes's ensemble. And we can see it a little bit more closely here. But let's look at it in detail. Okay, so here it is. This is a type of painting called an icon. And I had talked with you in a previous takeout about an icon that's downstairs in gallery number four of the foundation, the little icon of St. Nicholas. And here we have an icon that is a little bit larger physically, but it was made earlier than the one that is downstairs. This icon was painted sometime in the 1500s on the island of Crete and it depicts the nativity of Christ. Now, the specific version of the nativity of Christ that we see here is a little bit different than what some Western audiences might be used to seeing. We don't necessarily have a wooden manger that the Christ child and the Holy family are positioned within. Instead, we've got this cave-like setting and let's zoom in on it. And we can see here that we've got the Christ child within his little wooden manger, but this is all positioned not in kind of a stable setting, but instead inside a cave. We've got a star up above rendered in gold. We've got gold leaf surrounding the Virgin Mary's head and this large halo. We've got gold highlights on her crimson robe and on her blue garment. Notice this large gold halo behind the head of the Christ child. How do we know it's Christ? Well, we know because we've got this nice little inscription here, which is also rendered in gold, which says Jesus Christ in little Greek letters. We have an ox and a donkey who are here breathing warm air onto the Christ child to keep him warm, something that we see in depictions of the nativity throughout the depictions of this subject matter. Again, and we'll come back to some of the other images here that we see, but again, this is taking place within a cave. And so this goes back to the tradition in the Eastern Mediterranean of Christ's nativity taking place in a cave in the city of Bethlehem. And so I wanted to show you some photographs of the church of the nativity that is in the city of Bethlehem. And we can see here the exterior of it. The interior, which you can see right here, is a building that has a long history. It was originally built by the Roman emperor Constantine, is paid for by him. And then it was rebuilt and renovated extensively in the sixth century, so in the 500s under the emperor Justinian. Justinian might be familiar to a number of you because he is the emperor who was responsible for the construction of Hagia Sophia in the city of Constantinople. So the church that we are looking at here that we are inside is the church of the nativity. It is believed to be built over the site of the sacred cave, which is also known as a grotto. So I wanted to show you a floor plan of this church. The dark black that you see here is the original church. It's a floor plan of the original church built by Constantine in the 400s. This outline that you see that extends the size of the church is the part of the building that was renovated by Justinian. And so it was made larger. And this allowed for more people to come visit what was believed to be the birthplace of Christ. And all of the focus of the architecture is on this end here, on the eastern end where the grotto was located. And so I wanted to show you some pictures of that grotto as it looks today. So here's the entryway down into the grotto. And so people today still go and visit this monument and what is believed to be a sacred space. They step down into this grotto. And then when you get inside, so here are the steps right here and there's another set of steps right here. So there's a constant flow of traffic. So people descend down here and then they ascend out of the grotto on the other side. And this is the grotto itself. And so what people do when they go to visit this sacred space is that they bend down and venerate this marble slab. And so you can see people here who are venerating the grotto. And when we look inside this little space, what we see is a marble floor that has a hole in it. And this hole is decorated with this silver surround, the starburst. And this marks the spot where it is believed that Christ was born. And so this has become over the centuries, over the millennia really, a very one of the most important sacred spaces for Christians. But when we return back to our image, we can see here that there's other stuff going on. It's not just the grotto, but we've got this group of men here. Let's zoom in on them since we can. We have this group of men here. They're holding gifts. So these are the three magi who are bringing gifts to the Christ child. Down below we have a very kind of sad looking Joseph. And Joseph is trying to rebuff the suggestions by these shepherds who are saying, they're trying to sow seeds of doubt and he's ignoring them. And he successfully ignores them within the narrative of the story. In the middle of this picture is this really lovely representation of the Virgin Mary. We've got some shepherds in the background. And then we've got this whole host of angels who are extending their hands out. Their hands are covered and they are, in an essence, they are showing reverence to the miraculous birth of the Christ child. If we look up in the sky, there are more angels. You can see some heads of angels and you can see some angels that are kind of relaxing on some clouds. And a couple of them are holding these scrolls. And there's a scroll on the other side. And I really need to give all credit for the kind of detailed information about this icon to my colleague Amy Gillette who has done a lot of research on this painting. And in the course of her research, she was able to uncover that the painting was, as I mentioned, painted on the island of Crete in the 1500s. We also know that these little Greek inscriptions on these scrolls that are open here and here are the beginning of a liturgical prayer known as the Gloria, which is glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of goodwill. So that's what is said here. And this comes from the gospel stories. Comes from the gospel of Luke at the birth of Christ when the angels are so excited about this. They exclaim glory to God in the highest. And we know, and again, this is thanks to the work of my colleague Amy, we know that the overall iconography or the way the composition that we have here comes from an older monument. It comes from a wall painting at a church in Greece in the city of Mistras, which was a very important city in what was known as the Byzantine empire. And so we can see here the exterior of this little Byzantine church and the interior of it is completely covered in frescoes. And this is known as the Parableptos Monastery in Mistras. And one of the frescoes includes an image of the nativity. So you have the Virgin here wearing blue. You have the Christ child. Notice you've got the donkey and the ox set within a cave. You've got Joseph down below. And then you have the host of angels up above. And so when we look at our example at the barns, we are seeing a very Eastern type of image of the nativity. And the last thing I'll mention about it is that even though it's an Eastern image, it is one that had a Western audience. So whoever painted this, and we don't know who exactly the painter was. We don't have the artist's name, but whoever the painter was was painting this for an audience that would have been interested in both the Greek style or the Eastern style of nativity image and also elements that might look a little bit more Western or more Italian. And so one of the Italian aspects of this painting is sort of 15th or 16th century Italian style is the position of the Virgin Mary with her hands crossed over her chest. And this is something that you see in representations from later Western medieval art of the Virgin Mary. So there's an interesting kind of cross-pollinization of different kinds of styles for this image. Now this is an icon. This was probably made for a personal devotional use. And when we see it in context at the Barnes Foundation, and so we'll kind of zoom out to see it on display with all of these other objects from all over the world. We've got a Korean painting right here. We've got all of these lovely Renmore pictures, these ancient objects down below, these sculptures by the Cube of Sculpture Jacques Lipschitz. And what Barnes is asking us to do is to think about how the forms that we see in that little icon connect to the other objects that are in the room. So I would encourage you to spend time with this ensemble. It's a really fun one to unpack and to find all of these interconnections between. So again, thank you for joining me today and join us for another Barnes Takeout. Take care, bye-bye. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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. 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