 Again, the welcome and apologies from Martha Lucy, who unfortunately can't be here today, but my wonderful colleague, Nina Salagram, has offered to step in to her shoes to moderate the next panel for us. So Martha won't be here today, but we still have a moderator and also of course, at this point, there's both old friends and so many of you know each other and also just from the day new friends and so we can all kind of jump in to ask questions together. So with that, I think I will just kick things off. It's the same protocol as it's been with the advisors introducing their students. And so I will just invite up Professor Vareneze from Rutgers University to get us started. Oh, did I do that? Oh, I'm so sorry, Tamara Sears. This is the problem of reading in the galay or I apologize, Tamara. You know, they say that people start resembling their pets, perhaps. Well, yes. And to future Professor, I am sure, Sarah Vareneze. I'll be up soon. Any case, my name is Tamara Sears and I am the specialist in South Asian Art at Rutgers University, where I also serve on the executive committees for South Asian studies, global medieval studies, British studies, and the global Asia's initiative, which I co-directed for four years. So today, it gives me great pleasure to introduce my student, Sarah Vareneze. I'm making sure I get the right one, whom I've had the pleasure of advising for the past six and a half years. So Sarah entered the PhD program at Rutgers in the fall of 2017 after completing an MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies, or so as, at the University of London. She came to us with a broad range of expertise, ranging from the history and conservation of architectural and environmental heritage, which was the focus of her undergraduate study in Turin to Odisi Dance, which she had studied in India for a number of years. And I should note that the latter informed her MA thesis, at so as, which focused on representations of dance and music in Indian temple programs. So the paper that she presents today is actually part of a larger dissertation on the urban history of Bhuvaneshvara, which is a temple town in eastern India, which had emerged as a key sacred center between the seventh and 12th centuries. Because of its prominence, Bhuvaneshvara's many temples have been of great interest to scholars, generating a large body of literature on their architectural forms and visual programs. However, to date, Bhuvaneshvara's temples have typically been treated as discrete entities, as individual monuments to be understood primarily in terms of their individual iconographies and architectural styles. In her larger dissertation, Bhuvaneshvara takes on a very different approach, zooming out to the level of sight in order to situate temples in relationship to their natural landscapes. She has created expansive GIS data sets and mapped monuments in the field in order to understand the groupings of temples in relationship to local hydrologies and to situate their construction in relationship to the construction of stepwells, artificial lakes, and canals. Her paper today provides a glimpse of how that deeper understanding, she's not gonna be talking quite about that today, but it provides a glimpse of how doing that kind of work has enabled her to ask new questions about sculptural programs and architectural forms and to think about how temples may have engaged the ecologies of their embedded landscapes in ways that generate fresh interpretations. I should note that Sarah has been active in graduate affairs on campus, bringing her investment in environmental approaches to art history into the organization of a graduate student symposium that invited participants to employ echocritical perspectives to engage the entanglements and tensions between human communities and their natural landscapes. Her research has been supported by a number of prestigious fellowships, including from the Society of Architectural Historians and the Deutscher Kaddische Dienste or DAD. She has presented portions of her dissertation at a wide range of conferences in Europe and the US. And I should note that Sarah is one of the many students who was deeply affected by COVID. She was just about to begin her fieldwork at the very moment when we went into lockdown. And that was a real problem since her dissertation is a fieldwork-intensive project, but she has persevered marvelously and is on target now to finish next year. And so with that, I'm gonna turn the stage over to Sarah Barnesey. Thank you, Tamara. And thank you to the Barnes Foundation and also to everyone here and online. I'm really looking forward to the discussion. So the city of Bhuvaneswar, the capital of the state of Odisha in Eastern India, today is a sprawling metropolis. Walking through the traffic streets of the modern city, however, a visitor may encounter a much older ritual core dating between the 6th and 13th centuries. As worlds become narrower, our network of canals feeds the many water reservoirs dotting their older urban landscape. In addition to sustaining the ongoing life of Bhuvaneswar's temples, these water structures nourish the uncontainable vegetation that encroaches upon human spaces, especially during the monsoon season. The flourishing vegetation is echoed on older temple reliefs, where vines twist over wall surfaces and lotus blooms emerge from vases of plenty. Bhuvaneswar's temple reliefs provide a window into an older landscape subsumed within the modern urban fabric. They show animals roaming the wilderness, echoing an ecology that fostered the initial development of Bhuvaneswar. In the late sixth century, this landscape was a wet deciduous forest with ample resources to support vast populations of wild elephants that roam freely in the forest adjacent to the city. So Bhuvaneswar is like where the two mark is in that kind of area, and that's marking kind of the locations of the main elephant forest in ancient India, basically. So this landscape was so closely associated with elephants that it was named Gajavan also a forest for elephants. There are few images as widely recurrent as the elephant in Indian art. Historically, their iconography was tied to water cosmology, where water and the monsoon are the source of all life, and sky elephants sign the monsoon clouds. They are also often associated with kingship and military power, so we can find them in reliefs depicting military processions as part of the four-fold Indian army, accompanied by cavalry, chariots, and foot soldiers. And we do have examples of this in Bhuvaneswar as well. But they're also prominently featured in depictions of hunts, showing warrior figures involved in the capture of elephants deep in the forest. Whereas the significance of the elephant in water cosmology and military warfare has been amply explored, the image of the hunt in early medieval India has not been looked at quite as closely. I suggest that I don't only do these scenes function as signifiers of military prowess, but they also evoke the setting of the forest as a remote space, one that lay beyond the ordered structures of the city, and that was inhabited by powerful creatures with whom humans developed complex relationships. In this presentation, I explored the meaning of hunts scenes that appear on the early stampos in Bhuvaneswar. These were built in the seventh century at a formative moment in the city's urban development. As humans began establishing their presence in this environment and carving out residential spaces, temple reliefs envisioned the wilderness of the elephant forest that surrounded the settlement, evoking a key transitional moment that saw the transformation of a forest hermitage into a budding pilgrimage town. So I focus on three key scenes that are from these earliest stampos, the Satrik Neshwara and the Parasura Neshwara, and I'm just noting the location of these scenes here, so they're not hidden away. They're on or around the lintel or just above the main niches where the main icon of the temple is. So they are close to eye level. They're very visible. Anyone circumambulating the temple will likely observe them as they are just above the entrances or just above the main icons. Also, they mark the threshold, which was a particular space. It was a space of ritual transition, and in later temples, it will actually be marked by the ETI icon, so it was a pretty important location. And going to my first example, so this is a long panel just above the doorway of the Parasura Neshwara temple, and here we find a complex and animated representation of an elephant hunt unfolding in a densely forested landscape. It is worth noting that elephants, so elephants, elephant hunts were not intended to be lethal. They were aimed at capturing adult elephants that could be put into human service. And this is because, so elephants were rarely raised from birth in captivity because of the great amount of resources that were needed to nurture them. One adult elephant consumes around 350 pounds of vegetation per day, which is the reason why they were typically allowed to mature in the wild, and then as we see in this example, they were captured and tamed only as adults. So in this relief, we can see exactly this kind of activity happening. There is a group of hunters attempting to capture wild elephants in a forest setting, signaled as such by the numerous trees among which the action takes place. The hunters are seated on already domesticated elephants, identifiable by the harnesses made of cords and straps that wrap around their chests. There are two riders on each elephant. You can see this, especially in the examples here. So there are two riders on each elephant. One of them sits in front on the shoulders and the second one is towards the back within the reach of a cold rope and held on by a simple rope harness that kind of goes around their back. In the scene, we can see that two wild elephants have just been captured. They don't have harnesses, but they have ropes wrapped around one of their legs. And you can see this in the second elephant from the left that the rope is also tethered to a tree so the elephant is kind of tied down. And then we can also see the struggle against this capture. So the second wild elephant, this one here to the right has managed to get free. He has a rope around one of his legs, but he's holding the other end with his trunk having just ripped it from where it was tethered. His strength is also signaled by his tusks. We can notice that they're longer than the other elephants in the relief indicating a powerful mill bull that would have been a prize addition to the army. This elephant is causing some chaos in the hunt. So we can see, I'm just, so we can see here a human, a human rushing to climb up one of the domesticated animals to seek refuge. And this is shown in great detail. So the tame elephant is raising his foot to kind of give the human a step up. And then the human is crumbling up with great dexterity. He's holding onto the harness, lifting a foot almost impossibly high. And then we can imagine Buddha pushed himself up to sit behind the driver. The action continues on the other side. We can see that another hunter has jumped down from his mount. He has a rope in his hands that he's just unraveled from the side of the harness. And he's sneaking up on the enraged elephant from behind. It's gonna capture him again in just a second. So once captured, elephants needed to be tended and trained often in forested areas in the outskirts of settlements. We see such an example represented in a slightly earlier relief in Bubanashur. And so we see a herd of elephants being tended to by a human who appears to be an elephant trainer. The scene is animated towards the left. Two elephants are playfully interacting, turning towards each other. And to the right, another two appear to be grazing from a tree. Nearby the elephant trainer struggles to guide a disobedient stray using his elephant goat. All the elephants are marked distinctly as tusk males, suggesting that what we are seeing is the training of war elephants, which were often outfitted with blankets and bells. And we can see this in the elephant to the right. He's got a blanket on his back. So such domesticated forests were spaces where human-animal relationships could be safely cultivated. By contrast, in wild and undomesticated forests, the potential for violence was always imminent in conflicts between humans and animals. In my second example from the Parashurah-Mashurah temple, we see exactly this happening. I'm just showing the location again. So the forest is shown as a dangerous space where the relationship between humans and nature could be tense and even violent. On the left side of the relief, yes. On the left side of the relief, we see hunters mounted on a domesticated elephant. Just in front of them, another human is confronting a couple of wild elephants, a male and a female, and pushing a spear directly into the chest of the male bull. The enormous strain of this is shown by the figure crouching with his weight pushed on his back leg. The scene is mirrored to the right where a rider on horseback is also confronting a couple of large felines, possibly tigers or lions, and using a spear to kill one of them. The ferocity of the scene is reinforced by a vignette of a buffalo and a calf fleeing to the far right. The combination of elephant and horse and the warrior-like central figure point to ancient army divisions, suggesting a hunt that has a military connotation. The scene also resonates with tropes of royal prowess as articulated in contemporary inscriptions. For example, a seven-century land ground from this region describes the king striking the chest of a large elephant with his weapon. In early medieval Orissa, power was continuously fluctuating as localized clans competed for control over the landscape. This kind of imagery then celebrates king's virility and conquering power, and in this context, the elephant not only serves as foil for the king's strength, it also signifies the richness of the landscape that he is controlling. The hunt's ability to signal military prowess was reinforced by its inherent violence, and this is indicated by textual sources, including classic epics such as the Mahabharata, where kings enacted hunts with notable ferocity. Describing one of these narratives, historian Romila Tapar writes, quote, families of tigers and deer were killed and severely wounded elephants trampled the forest. So fierce was the slaughter of animals that predators and prey took refuge together. Might we be looking at depictions of such ferocious hunts in these reliefs or at allegories of six century king's virility and power in battle? I suggest that in addition to this, reliefs also evoke the forest as the lived environment that surrounded Bhuvaneshtra in the initial stages of settlement, an environment which humans inhabited not without conflict. The six and seven century represent the very earliest phases of temple construction in Bhuvaneshtra, a moment that was full of experimentation and only in later temples solidified in a more standardized decorative program. However, later temples at Bhuvaneshtra continued to emphasize the wildness of elephants. In an example from a 13th century temple, we find a decorative freeze of wild elephants depicted in the state of must or rotting. So must occurs when male elephants enter a state of excitement, often characterized by violent behavior and aggression as shown here by the elephants ripping trees from the ground and snarling in rage. It is possible that this specific variation of the elephant motif, undomesticated and in must, was connected to the character of the temple that it adorned. The relief is located on a temple dedicated to the fierce goddess Chamunda, positioned outside the world enclosure of the massive Lingaraja temple, which served as the main temple in Bhuvaneshtra after the 11th century. So inside the precinct is another goddess temple dedicated to Parvati, who is comparatively serene goddess and the wife of the Hindu god Shiva. So there is two goddess temples as Parvati and Chamunda and they're built almost very close to each other. They're physically very close to each other, except that one is within the enclosure of the temple and the other one is on the same side but outside. So a chaotic deity, often associated with death and destruction, Chamunda was intentionally kept outside the ordered space of the Lingaraja temple enclosure. And in this light, the violent nature of the rotting elephant seems in keeping with the character of the goddess temple that it adorns. In this presentation, I showed elephant hunt reliefs located on the oldest accent temples in Bhuvaneshtra. Like the temple to Chamunda, they were located away from the main settled area which was just south of the Bindu Sagar. So yeah, it's shown over there. The main area that will become the city is just south of the central kind of water reservoir and these temples are kind of outside of that. They were identified as ashramas, sites of aesthetic practice and the significance of this can also be found in Tapar's characterization of the hunt. She writes, if the forest is seen as a place which is without order or discipline then it is required of the Raja or the king to control it and the hunt becomes the beginning of such control. This subordination was also achieved perhaps less dramatically through the setting up of ashramas in the forest. So ashramas or forest hermitages were the initial outposts of human settlement in this forested site that will develop in the following centuries into a powerful dynastic center then into the current metropolis. It is possible, is it possible to recognize in their temple reliefs a reference to the initial encounter between a human community and the wilderness that it was trying to settle? Within the ecology of Arisha which I described as a densely forested river delta the site of the camera was particularly rich in waters and I'm just gonna conclude quickly here. I'm showing this encounter between these populations of wild elephants and the humans and they're both trying to bathe in the same pool of water and so we can see that there's panic on both sides. So yeah, material remains in Bhuvanashwar show this interaction between pre-modern settled communities and the powerful ecology that surrounded them and we are shown the hunt, capture and domestication as different modes of controlling, ordering and harnessing the forest. The location of these really showed a similar role for the ashramah, the forest hermitage, a liminal space between settlement and wilderness and fulcrum for further urbanization. The prevalence of wild elephant herds in the historical landscape of Bhuvanashwar is reflected in material culture where their imagery accompanies that of domesticated ones. These depictions echo the Gajavana and establish a correspondence between the powerful aesthetics which inhabited the fringes of human society, the wild animals which roamed the landscape and the fearsome deities of esoteric ritual. Thank you so much. Thank you. My name is Basil Buddez, I teach at Princeton and it is my greatest pleasure tonight to introduce John White. John White is a fourth year PhD candidate in the art and archaeology at Princeton. His research examines the intersections of art, nature and science in early modern Northern Europe construed in a global context. His dissertation in particular studies on European artists and rulers categorized and exoticized the people and natural world of the far North, especially by way of ivory from walruses and no walls in the Baltic Sea. He received a BA in art history from Brown University and an MA in art history from the University of Massachusetts at Armhurst. Formerly a dancer, as you've heard. He also received a master's from the University of Edinburgh where his research and practice focused on dance made for the camera. His dance related research has been published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Screen Dance and his research otherwise has appeared in the International Review of African American Art and the 2023 Book Objects and Organisms published by the Accordure. Prior to graduate school, he interned at the Kennedy Foundation in Martha, Texas and worked at Artnet in New York City. At Princeton, he's involved in the prison teaching initiative through which he tutors students in Southwood's Connexional Facility in South New Jersey. His paper tonight, The World Within a Whale, will be part of a larger dissertation chapter exploring whaling in the early modern Baltic and how it intersected with natural history called imagery and European colonial expansion. Please join me in welcoming John White. Thank you so much to Basil whose feedback and influence have been very integral to today's paper and to the larger project. I also wanna thank the Barnes Foundation and especially Elia Palumbo for the clear and kind communication and Naina Salagram for being the chair for this panel. I also wanna thank a Columbia University summer Dutch program that exposed me to the material I'm sharing today which I never would have known about otherwise and I wanna thank some dear friends and family who are here today who have always shaped and sharpened my thinking. So from elephants to whales. Across the winter and spring of 2023, numerous national media outlets remarked on a sharp uptick in the number of dead whales that washed shore in New Jersey and in New York. In the photos that accompany these articles, people snap pictures of the dead whales with their iPhones as though the phenomenon of a beached whale has to be seen to be believed even if only seen vicariously. Asking why so many whales washed shore, these articles invariably point to a constellation of factors that we would collectively call global climate change. Today, I will trace a selective history to images such as this one and to the global climate catastrophe in which we find ourselves a catastrophe that we actively create. To do so, I turned to the low countries today, the Netherlands and Belgium in the late 16th century, a time and place marked by severe weather conditions and floods as part of what numerous historians have referred to as the so-called Little Ice Age. I seek in particular an understanding of how humans came to see nature as something to master, to possess, to exploit. In a watercolor with accompanying text from 1585, Adrian Conan describes the capture and measurement of a giant fish near Antwerp. The text in part reads, true to life portrait and dimensions of the fish caught on 2nd July 1577 in the river Skeld. It was finished off with picks, hooks, and other instruments. He was 58 feet long, 16 feet, three thumbs high and 12 feet broad. The distance from the tip of his mouth to the farthest point of his eyes was 15 feet and four feet, three thumbs from the eyes to the fin. The fins were five feet, two thumbs long. His jaw was seven thumbs wide at the tip, but one foot, six thumbs at the back with a length of eight feet. The tail was 14 feet, three thumbs wide, and his penis was eight feet long and tapering. The boatman who killed him called him a whale. Here, we witness humans coming to terms with the scale of a large creature from the sea, a creature larger than most fish that they knew. The people in the watercolor are tiny in comparison to the massive whale. One human atop the whale brandishes an instrument significantly longer than they are to finish off the animal, thereby demonstrating that a tool so tall as to disappear beyond the top edge of the frame is needed to match the grand size of the whale. To the side of that figure hovering in a medallion over the pink inky water, the whale's length of 58 feet is announced in large script. Conan's image betrays a terrifying tension. The whale, though measurable, is nonetheless exponentially larger than are we. This watercolor is drawn from a book by Adrian Conan that features numerous images of whales. The book from 1585 was the third in a loose series of three manuscripts by him. The first in 1574, a vispoke or a fish book, he gave as a present to William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt. The second longer vispoke from roughly 1578 is held now at the Royal Library in The Hague where I saw it last summer. But all of the images I'm discussing today are from the third book, the whale book, or volvisbok, which has been studied at length already to some degree, especially by the Dutch historian Floreca Egmond, whose book we see here and from whom I've drawn some of my translations. My intentions today are not to sketch the overarching contributions of Conan's manuscripts, but rather to set Conan's images within a larger art historical context that reveals a preoccupation in the early modern period with measuring and mastering the massive whale. Adrian Conan made his living in the fishing industry, not as an artist. Born in 1514 near The Hague, he learned about marine life from both the practical experiences of fishermen and from international scholarly publications that he accessed to view wealthier townspeople. As glimpsed thus far, Conan's watercolors are not of the finely rendered type traditionally associated by the field of art history with Renaissance European natural history, I showed just one example here. Rather than view Conan as unschooled or untrained though, I want to propose that we consider his watercolors as part of a wide field of image production that animated Renaissance Europe's emergent understanding of the natural world, especially of the vast and unknown sea. Indeed, we will see that Conan, though not an artist in the traditional sense, was aware of certain representational conventions that connect his images to contemporaneous artworks and visual strategies. Many artists of Conan's time explored beached whales in various mediums. Part of what is appealing about Conan's marine images is the liquidity of his medium of watercolor, a medium that was popular in natural historical imagery, yet that sets him apart from other notable contemporaneous images of whales. Hendrik Goldsie has produced a drawing of a beached whale on the coast of the Netherlands in 1598, and Jan Sanredam made a rather large engraving of a beached whale in North Holland in 1602. Much earlier, before Conan's watercolors, Albrecht Dürer in his diaries reported from Antwerp in December 1520 that he had heard word of a beached whale nearby, one that was, quote, more than 100 bathrooms long. He writes that, quote, no one alive in Zealand has seen one as much as a third this length, end quote. Dürer was fascinated by many aspects of the storied whale, including its smell. He sort of says that people are in a frenzy, afraid that it's going to begin stinking to high heaven. However, he, not unlike Conan, seems most concerned with quantifying its almost unbelievably large size. In early modern Europe, whales were the stuff of tall tails, but they also were a material presence within many people's lives. Since at least late antiquity, whale bone was used to make sculptures, chess pieces, combs, and small devotional objects. The town hall in Harlem, near Amsterdam, still today has a giant whale bone hanging in its main room. The mayor of Harlem, who was actually a really nice person, told me that the whale bone he believes is from the 16th century, whereas the building itself is earlier, as you can see, but a precise date is unknown. By fragmenting the whale and its parts into collectibles, people could display that they had mastered nature, even something as huge as the whale and its bones, which at the time were said by some, such as Dürer, to be the bones of giants. Cabinets of curiosities and Kunstkammern often asserted humans' power to categorize and contain the wonders, both large and small, of the vast world. Indeed, I argue most simply that Conan's images are, like much of art history, is about power. In the face of severe weather conditions and beached whales, both of which spoke to God's terrifying power, Conan and others studied these dead, massive creatures in order to possess their abundance and thereby assert humans' own power over nature and its extremes. The whale operated visually for Conan and for others as a metonym for the sea and its unfathomable depths, all of which they could claim under their control by way of the material access granted through the phenomenon of beaching. Throughout his texts and images, Conan's sources include the likes of Pliny and perhaps most frequently, Oleus Magnus, the Swedish cartographer and Catholic priest. On a page of the whale book that we see here devoted to a swordfish, a unicorn and a sawfish, Conan writes at the top that the creatures appear as Oleus describes them. The swordfish at left holds a half-eaten smaller creature in its mouth, while a nearby larger creature seems poised to bite the swordfish, the circle of life. Conan describes the unicorn at lower right as, quote, a sea monster with a very long horn on its forehead with which it pierces the ships it comes across. What people such as Conan typically called a unicorn or a sea unicorn is what we would now consider a narwhal, but due to ideas dating back as far as Pliny, many people in early modern Europe believed that every land animal had a corresponding marine counterpart, so if there was a unicorn there was a sea unicorn. Conan likely drew this information from Magnus's published writings as well as his images, namely Magnus's famous Cartup Marina from the 1530s, I showed just a detail here, features numerous sea creatures and monsters. Many of the sea monsters in Magnus's Cartup Marina are clearly whales. Historian Sirika Davies writes that such sea creatures demonstrate the imaginative approaches employed by people like Conan toward visualizing that which was at the borders of their knowledge. Magnus and Conan both in their images exaggerate the size and scale of these creatures, some here even as large as islands, perhaps to underscore the dangerous power of these animals that supposedly could pierce ships and drown sailors. However, scholars have shown how the ability to conjure monstrous creatures on the page was in some cases linked to the idea of an artist's divinely bestowed power. In this sense, Conan's imagination to synthesize such uncanny creatures might have been understood to mirror nature's work of divine creation. When a whale washed ashore, however, the people confronted with the huge animal understood it not as an artistic divination but as a very real demonstration of God's power. Alongside his image seen here of Jonah in the whale, Conan writes, oh, how wonderfully does God almighty work through big fish. Jonah is swallowed by a big fish and then spewed out again on land as you can read in the Bible, end quote. Jonah was said to have lived within the whale for three days. The whale thereby becomes a form of habitation, not unlike Conan's illustration of dwellings supposedly constructed from whale bones, another topic that he lifts from Odleus Magnus. Here the whale is transformed from an underwater place of punishment to an intentional home on land. The skeletal frame, a display both of nature's grandness and of man's ingenuity over nature. And we may be reminded here of the whale bone hanging in the Harlem Town Hall, which also seems to serve a sort of architectural purpose if only ornamental. In the text accompanying a print by Jacob Mathem after the goldiest drawing that I showed earlier, Karl von Mander writes that quote, the cruel salt waves hellishly turned up by stormy skies have washed up such a fish to show us God's wondrous works out of the depths of the sea measuring 11 inches and six and 50 feet long and three and 30 thick, end quote. Here von Mander links the awe inspiring work of God both to the stormy sea and to the large size of the whale which has been dutifully measured. However, what the print actually shows us is the lifelessness of the massive creature as people begin to pierce it, prod it and piece it apart. The sort of economy that circled around whales is a very interesting topic that I won't really get into but among other things the blubber was boiled down into oil that many people use. Sperm whales also produce as many of us may know a sort of mysterious substance in their stomachs I believe called ambergris that was highly desired as sort of a medicine and a perfume. There were many reasons to sort of piece apart and fragment the whale. In an engraving by Peter van der Heiden from the 1550s after a design by Breuchel, we see a visualization of an old Latin proverb stating that big fish eat the small. Countless smaller fish spill both from the mouth of a beached fish and from its gut where a human has made a cut with an impossibly large knife. The creature here seems to contain the entirety of an underwater ecosystem. Despite its largeness though the big fish is examined and harvested by humans who are ultimately the image argues the biggest fish capable of mastering even God's most massive creatures. In my focus on Conan and the Netherlands I do not mean to suggest that the preoccupation with the large whale was uniquely Dutch. Numerous scholars have critiqued the literature on the so-called Dutch golden age for a tendency to hold the Dutch aloft as an exceptional people. In 1550 a large whale carcass found near Livorno was displayed in the Logia de Lanci in Florence. Its skeleton reassembled and displayed separately from the body. And to return to maps, the architectural historian Simon O'Meara has identified an early modern map centered on the Kaaba, a pattern of cartographers visualizing the structure surrounded by a sea in the shape of a whale. He and other scholars relate this visual trope to Islamic traditions according to which God created the earth upon a giant fish or whale. The Arabic word is hoot. While various art historians have traced the relationships between texts and images in Europe and the Islamic Middle East in the early modern period, I do not suggest any connection here between maps such as this and Conan or his circle. Instead I mean to expand beyond the scope of Conan and Judeo-Christian traditions to consider how a variety of faiths viewed the whale as relating to origins or origin stories. If the whale is understood as pertaining to biblical beginnings or the beginning of the world itself, then the visual preoccupation with the beached whale and its large scale becomes a harbinger of even more epic proportions. Confronted with God's wondrous work washed up from the ocean to the shore, Conan and others measure and fragment this giant creature to fit it into their worldview, to contain it within their images and their stories, to control it in the vast sea that it represents. In a very recent article for the Netherlands yearbook for history of art, Rachel Case analyzes Jan Sanredam's beached whale that we saw earlier in relation to the porousness of land and water in the low countries. Case writes that the Netherlands is located primarily at or below sea level and that more than half of the Netherlands would today be under water if there were no dunes or dikes to protect against floodwaters. Marissa Bass has referred to the low countries in the early modern period poetically as quote a watery body of land. Increasingly today, we find ourselves living in watery bodies of land. The beached whale, here I show the skookle very nearby here overflowing after Hurricane Ida in 2021. The beached whale is a symptom of the flood in which we already live. Though we may devise tools for living in and controlling the flood, such as dunes and dikes, we cannot keep the flood at bay forever. I will close with the proposal that Conan's images are at no more of a removal from us than is this image. Although we scroll past images such as this and feel at a distance from them, I argue that these images both speak crucially to the time and place in which we live. These images do not address us from afar but are part of the world we have made or rather unmade. We may learn from the simultaneous curiosity and fear that enabled Conan a closer relationship to the marine world than many of us feel today. Thank you. I'll just echo the gratitude of others. I really love coming to this conference. It's my eighth or ninth time coming over the past 20 years across different avatars. It's especially nice when I get to introduce one of my own advisies. So I'm going to introduce Ben Alsop, who is currently a graduate curatorial intern in the Manuscripts Department at the Getty Museum. And he is developing a fascinating exhibition there on the art and science of light in the Middle Ages, kind of nicknamed the Lies Ages Project. Sorry, in the Middle Ages, the Lies Ages Project. He has a BA in History of Art from the University of York, MA at Syracuse University in Florence and published his MA thesis with a wonderful title, His Blood Shweeks Out, The Blood of Christ in Fra Angelico's Frescoes for the Novice Cells at the Covenant San Marco in Florence, which appeared in the Rutgers Art Review in 2021. And his dissertation is called Containing, Framing, and Authentication, Interaction Between Passion, Relics and Art in Venice and the Veneto from 1460 to 1540. The project concerns the dialogue of painting and relics in Venice and its mainland territorial state from the 1300s to the 1500s. Ben is taking on board an influential and persistent narrative of the rise of painting in the 1200s as an emulation and relocation of the sacred aura of relics, where panel paintings come to acquire and displace the power of relics, while relics acquire the visual fascination of images. And he's also challenging subsequent acquaintance of stylistic archaism as a mode of authentication in the 1400s. In addressing the logic of supplementarity, operating between painting, relic, and scriptural text, Ben insists on equal attention to artistic invention, assertive stylization, and the visibility of artistic persona in an array of novel techniques employed in the framing, display, and concealment of relics. Ben, all's up. Thank you, Stephen, for that very kind introduction. Thank you to the Barnes Foundation for organizing this really great event. Yeah, and thank you for everyone today for really interesting, fascinating papers. So, without further ado. At the center of Lazaro Bastiani's donation of the relic of the True Cross to the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista, two men hold up a fragment of a relic of the True Cross in front of a gothic, polyptic altarpiece. Within Bastiani's tableau, the relic is devoid of a reliquary and is thus framed by the fictive image behind it. It is my belief that such a direct juxtaposition of passion relic and image is representative of a broader concern that a group of painters from Venice addressed around the turn of the 16th century as they grappled with the role of the pictorial arts in staging and containing relics. In this paper, I address a commission from early in the career of the Venetian painter, Gentile Bellini, that brings these issues to the fore. In this temperate panel of 1472 by Gentile Bellini, Cardinal Basilio Bassarian kneels in adoration before a Stoudotech, that is a Byzantine reliquary containing fragments of the True Cross. This painted panel served as a door for a reliquary tabernacle in the boardroom of the confraternity of the Scuola della Carreta in Venice. The Stoudotech that Gentile depicts on the door was stored within this tabernacle. So, Gentile's painted door represents, with a high degree of accuracy, the Stoudotech that was kept directly behind it, donated by Bassarian to this Venetian lay confraternity in the 1460s. Here, I consider the painting's status as a panel that covered, whilst providing a view onto the reliquary contained within. Despite growing interest in medieval relics and reliquaries, there has been little scholarly work done on the decoration of cupboards for the storage of reliquaries. In a recent dissertation on ornamental paintings in Renaissance Venice, Susanna Rutherglen briefly addressed Gentile's painting, situating it in a culture in which patrons took an unhindered pleasure in containers themselves as works of art and as instruments of presentation. Rutherglen emphasises that partitions in Renaissance art, such as altarpiece wings and reliquary covers, were dynamic spaces of transformation and exchange. The celebrated Parla Ferriale by Paolo Veneziano that covered the San Marco high altar, Paolo d'Orro, is especially significant in this regard. While Gentile's character painting was a door, the Bassarian Stoudotech was an object that itself functioned by way of partition. As with most Byzantine Stoudotech, it had a sliding lid. So this sliding lid is illustrated on the right. This cover featured a painting of the crucifixion and was placed over the gilt crucifix and relics in the reliquary central section. This gilt crucifix, which we see illustrated on the left, this gilt crucifix is situated within the recession of a blue panel decorated with golden circles. To either side of the gilt crucifix are relics of the true cross, which we see above. And then we have relics of Christ's tunic below and both of these are underneath glass. This central panel is surrounded by eight painted narratives of Christ's passion. The Stoudotech was commissioned by the Byzantine imperial family in the mid 14th century. In 1459, Gregorius III of Constantinople bequeathed the reliquary to Bassarian in Rome. Bassarian was a Greek scholar, educated in Constantinople, who had become a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1439. He sent the reliquary to the squalor de la Carrethe in Venice in May 1472. The confraternity subsequently commissioned Gentile Bellini to produce the cover for the reliquary cover door that very summer. In this paper, I probe the correspondence between the Stoudotech and Gentile's representation of it, addressing the virtual transparency in the painting. Fundamentally, Gentile's painting practice provides a discursive commentary on the visual culture of reliquaries in the late middle ages. Moreover, underlying my analysis of this cabinet painting is an emphasis on the way in which Gentile complicates any standard binary opposition between concealment and revelation. When the painted door was, when the painted door cover was opened, a devotee was confronted by the Bessarian Stoudotech closed, its sliding cover in place. Thus, in the process of opening Gentile's door, the relics went from being rendered visible in paint to invisible. With Gentile's painting, to conceal was to simultaneously reveal. There are noteworthy Italian examples of correspondence between cover and venerated image, such as a 1503 painted panel that Vincenzo Fradiani produced to cover a cult fresco in the church of San Michele in Antracoli, Luca. Most relevant to the immediate context is Giovanni Bellini's destroyed 1484 panel painting of the Transfiguration, which functioned as a cover for the 14th century silver high altarpiece of the same subject at the church of San Salvatore Venice. In 1541, a 13th century Byzantine icon of the Madonna and child arrived at the Venetian church of San San Michele. It was usually covered by a gold revetment reproducing the icon underneath. Gentile's panel is especially intriguing, given that when the Stoudotech had its sliding cover taken off, the passion relics were visible behind flat panes of glass. While Gentile's painted cover bespeaks a transparency, the reliquary itself is transparent. Sensual to understanding the panel are issues pertaining to visibility in medieval relic creases, particularly those produced in Venice, a city famed for its production of glass and rock crystal. We can situate Gentile's painted cover against the context of the growing popularity of Ostensoria from the 13th century onwards. In these relic creases, the relic was clearly visible behind glass or rock crystal. Scholars have associated the development of the Ostensoria against the general late medieval emphasis on the spiritual power of sight, linking these reliquaries to liturgical practices, such as the visual adoration of the Eucharistic host. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims and clerics often negotiated visual access to relics by way of rock crystal. By the 14th century, glass, an artificial transparent material, unlike organic rock crystal, was also often being used for the production of Ostensoria. Recently, scholars have emphasised that attention needs to be given to the quality of rock crystal and glass to simultaneously contain and reveal, protect and display. As far back as the 9th century, the Benedictine monk, Rabbanus Marus, observed that when anything is placed in the glass, it appears just the way it appears outside it. The object is concealed and revealed at the same time. I believe that Gentile recognized and incorporated this quality of glass and rock crystal into his painted panel. The 15th century art theorist Leon Baptiste Alberti evoked the imagery of glass in his famous metaphor concerning the craft of painting. Alberti stipulates that the painter should begin by drawing a square on the blank surface. This square certainly functions for me as an open window through which the Astoria is observed. A few paragraphs prior, Alberti comments that when painters surround a surface with lines or fill-defined spaces with colors, they would seek to represent on this single surface nothing more than many different forms of surfaces, not otherwise than as if this surface, which they cover with color, were completely of glass or transparent. Thus, in the second half of the Quattrocento, painters were certainly familiar with the rhetoric of glass and transparency being applied to their craft. Before the glass revolution in Venice during the 15th century, the city was renowned for its carving of rock crystal to produce liturgical vessels. A branch of medieval art objects that are particularly relevant for Gentile's engagement with transparency are portable polyptics, relicrys and processional crosses that utilized flat panes of transparent rock crystal to cover parchment miniatures. These products were particular to early 14th century Venice and I have one example here from the VNA, a passion diptych in which we can see the painted parchment miniatures of the passion visible beneath the rock crystal. It is of bearing for my case study that in the late Middle Ages, Venetian artisans produced ensembles that prompted viewers to gaze through a transparent material to view figurative representation. By the mid 15th century, transparency took on even greater importance in Venice when Angelo Barrovie first manufactured crystal-o glass, a colorless, more transparent glass in the Murano workshops. Writing in 1493, Madin Sonudo noted that in Venice, there are so many glass windows that the glaciers are continually fitting and making them. In 1581, Francesco Sansovino commented on how the windows of Venetian houses were made of the whitest, finest glass. Such glass, of course, was also used in Venetian relicrys. Significantly, in the Veneto, there was a piece of glass that was worshiped as a relic in itself. According to a text on St. Anthony of Padua from 1232, a heretical knight named Aleardino doubted the sanctity of the saint and threw a glass goblet on the ground, which miraculously remained intact. Following this, the knight converted. From the 14th century, this vessel was kept within the Padua Basilica as an object of veneration, with a silver mount added to it. What is remarkable in ontological terms is that while it appears in the guise of a late medieval relicry, the glass object is itself the relic. The categories of relicry and relic blur and transparency assumes not only anesthetic but a devotional virtue. With this visual culture of transparency in mind, I note the terminology employed by Hans Belting in likeness and presence. By the end of the Middle Ages, the relicry now presented no more than a beautiful frame at the center of which the relic itself had to be seen. For example, through the window of a crystal relicry. I suggest that Gentile's cabinet panel functions as a transparent window, in much the same way as the passion relics appear behind glass windows in the Byzantine Stadotech. Yet to nuance Belting's claim, this painted panel is not just a beautiful frame, rather in its virtual transparency, it functions as both frame onto the panel and meta-commentary upon the operations of the relicry function. Indeed, the painting's framing function results in the Stadotech's relic, sorry, indeed the painting's framing function results in the Stadotech relicry becoming relic. Generally, Venetian relicries dating up to the mid 15th century were structurally similar with a rock crystal case standing on a base made of a foot and a stem with a central knob. Such relicries allowed for a form of display whereby the relic took on an almost pictorial quality. Slightly later, there were other forms of relicries produced in Venice, such as those in which the relics were displayed behind a flat pane of transparent material. Produced roughly contemporary to Gentile's panel, the Venetian relicry of the Hand of St. Martha is a good example of how a relic displayed behind transparent material glass could become a framed two-dimensional image. Comparing the St. Martha relicry to the Stadotech panel, one can clearly perceive the mechanics of Gentile's meta-commentary on the visual culture of relicries. Just as the St. Martha relicry flattened and pictorialized the relic, providing a window onto it, so does the painted automatic cover function as window onto the Stadotech within. Thus, in Gentile's panel, both Stadotech and Passion Relics are pictured relics, while the painted panel assumes the relicry function. If Gentile's painting was a window onto the relics originally stored behind it, my analysis prompts us to think beyond the Alberti's paradigmatic metaphor and to consider the painting in relation to the material realities of glass, rock crystal and transparency in the late medieval Veneto. As Gentile produced a work that simultaneously concealed and revealed the Passion Relics, his artistic project manifested itself as something more complex than Alberti's notion of the image surface as a neutral view onto a fictitious world. This is no passive window. The panel enacts a discursive work concerning the notion of transparency. As Gentile explored how the practice of painting resonated with contemporaneous customs for relic display and the utilization of transparent materials more broadly. In the painted panel, a neat binary between revelation and concealment breaks down as the door hides the relics, while also enabling visual access through their pictorialization. Thank you. Okay, can everybody hear me? Hi, I'm Nina and I'm filling in for Martha today and what a lucky role I get to be and to be able to listen to these three papers, not just in tandem with one another, but in the context of the entire day and in fact, two days that we've had together. In some ways, it's so wonderful to conclude with these works because I think that they put pressure on some of the really core functions in art history, namely that of representation. And I think that's really the core tie between the three papers is you're all exploring the nature and limits and capacities of representation within objects. And so I just wanted to first just thank all of you so much for these really, really rich papers and I want to think about them sort of in relation to one another since we have this unique opportunity. And so Sarah, you really interestingly, I think almost staged these elephant hunt scenes as site-specific works in that they are representing the landscape in which they were formed and in which the original temples were built. And John, on the other hand, you are really not looking at something that you're saying is universally that is sort of site-specific. You said these are not uniquely Dutch. So you're looking at the whale as a more universal symbol and relating across paradigms and across traditions between the Islamic and the Christian, as well as the local specificity to this Dutch context. And in this amazing Gentile presentation, I think that we're getting almost a circling back to where we started with Professor Lee's discussion of the assemblage. And I think we're getting a long history of the assemblage in some ways that was alluded to in last night's presentation that certainly I'm here as the Picasso fellow and I can valiantly say that I agree that Picasso didn't invent anything, least of all, assemblage. But the dual function of the panel as representation, as representing, and as the thing itself, as the relic itself. So you have these kind of three layers almost where the panel is acting as a window onto the reliquary and functioning as the reliquary itself and then that relating to the reliquary itself being conflated with the relic in much the same way that we speak about Cubist collages combining the thing itself and the capacity to signify. So I wondered if you all might just speak a little bit about the nature of representation in your projects, how you're thinking about how you are putting pressure on signification and representation in the work that you're doing in the papers you presented as well as maybe how they fit more broadly into your overall projects. Thank you. That's such an interesting question and a really difficult one as well. Yeah, so I guess for my paper there is my thinking around these images came from the fact that also, you know, I was photographing them in situ and so I was also kind of looking at beyond the image, beyond the temple, what's around it. And so it kind of, once you see the image framed by the ecology that is still there somehow, around Buvaneshwar, you can definitely see that this, I'm looking at this and it's kind of showing me what's also around. So it's kind of like when you're there it's really evident and I don't know if I was able to transmit it but there is definitely kind of like there's an object and there's the representation of the object and it's kind of like an image that travels. And I wonder if maybe you also find that's beyond the object that's being represented that's also pointing it to something else. Like there's not just the elephant, the elephant points to the forest, the forest points to God and kind of, yeah. But that's what I found was so wonderful between your paper and John's right after is there's almost that in order, I think you both spoke wonderfully about the human desire to control nature and to assert power over that which seems untamable or probably is untamable. And the representation kind of comes in, if we can represent it, it is our best effort to say that we can control it. And in that way there's almost, I loved so much, Sarah, how in these hunt scenes, what really is being represented is the idea of the wilderness, right? The idea of the untamable that's being represented at its limit case through what can be tamed. So the elephant can be tamed, the entire forest cannot be tamed. And similarly, I think John, you're working very in a similar paradigm that the whale and the obsession with measurability and the parts that we will represent that which we actually can contain that which we can give visual form to. Whereas the entirety of the sea, the entirety of the origins, human origins life can't be represented. And similarly, Ben, the notion of the relic itself is such a unique and interesting representational ontological problem, right? Because it's how does something that is a part, and I use the word metonym, John, that I think is really key to all three of your papers. But the relic standing in for ultimately, for the divine, right? For the divine itself. So I just love these connections and I wondered if you had any thoughts on these themes. I think you wrapped up some of what I was thinking really beautifully, but just to add maybe a little about what you were saying about maybe that which can't be represented. I think what's interesting about the beached whale is that it can only be represented or sort of encountered when it's dead. And so that lends itself to the idea of mastering or something, but I think what's interesting also what you were saying about that which can't be represented is something Baziel and I were talking about and which I only briefly, like briefly, briefly, briefly touched on in the presentation, which is that Dura mentions people being very concerned about the smell that the whale is going to stink to high heaven. I think part of why the whale is sort of both represented and fragmented is because it's too sort of overpowering, both the sort of heft of the omen of the beached whale and also just sort of the smell, the size, the strangeness, the slipperiness. And so I think the representing and fragmenting comes in to both make it more manageable but also to lend itself to sort of lore or myth. The sort of way that people relied on Fisherman's tales and I think the images tie into that which can't represented can instead be sort of mythologized or something, yeah. Yeah, so to expand on some of these ideas of representation, I guess I've been thinking about how, yeah, it plays into this kind of paradox of how in representing the relic, there is also the concealment of the relic at the same time and it kind of, that in itself plays into the kind of, as you mentioned this, the ontology of the relic which obviously gives you access to the divine but at the same time, there is also a distancing. And I think kind of what I'm grappling with is the way in which the process of painting that we see here is kind of mirroring what the relic also does in terms of representation, I suppose, in terms of access, yeah. Yeah, exactly, and I thought you're the way that you brought in glass and the material specificity of glass from the Venetian period was really wonderful. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the idea of containment because that was something that really came up so interestingly in Sarah and John's presentations of images of very different kind of containment. And, you know, Sarah, you really isolated these specific panels that are framed, that are bordered, that are, you know, we actually see not just the containing of the animal but they're presented in relief and there are sort of limits of the materiality too that is containing the image. And I was really interested, John, also in just the placement of text in the image and these kind of boxes and outlines. But then maybe you could start first with that in terms of the question of power and containing, can you talk a little bit about containing a relic and what that means in this moment? Yeah, I mean, again, so I kind of talked about this in the, you know, you had in the late Middle Ages this kind of desire to see this, you know, this belief that you could kind of attain, you know, a sense of sacrality from purely seeing the relic. But at the same time, you know, scholarship's kind of nuanced in that and saying, you know, authority structures wanted to, you know, only give access to the relic at certain times in certain conditions. So I think this kind of plays into the idea of containment and the role of painting in containing the relic in kind of providing that, you know, correct authoritative structure in which it's contained. Yeah, so. And in that way, because I think your project more largely also addresses issues of framing and the kind of the limits of the panel become analogized in some ways, as you said, the vessel that is being opened onto, but also being depicted. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then I probably kind of expand on that by thinking about the actual situation in which this relic was, the relicry was placed. So it was placed within what was called the alburgo. So this was kind of the kind of bureaucratic center of the Venetian squalor and it was surrounded by documents. So it's kind of this situation in which it's being kind of, the relic is being kind of conditioned by documentation. So the framing of text is also kind of pretty important in particular in this example, but also in some of the other case studies that I'm dealing with, yeah. Yeah, and did you have any thoughts, John, on the text image relationship in your works? I would love to just hear you talk about that for a minute. I have two thoughts about the sort of interesting things you're saying about containment. The first specifically about on the page, I think that's one of the really important ways in which it's clear that Adrian Conan, though you know not like an artist per se, is clearly in conversation with that's, it shows that he knows the sort of conventional manner by which like a lot of naturalist, scientist, artists are depicting specimens on the page with sort of a box and accompanying text. He doesn't use any like binomial nomenclature or anything, but he's sort of, I see his images as sort of within the trajectory of leading up to the very standardized sort of like picture of the specimen floating in space above Latin binomial nomenclature. So I think the framing and containing on the pages is definitely part of that larger practice like artistic, visual, like language of controlling. And then the other thing, the thing I'm really not at peace about with the whale is that even though I tried to argue very confidently for today that these images show people sort of containing whales, I think what I'm trying to do going forward with the work is show that they're actually not successful in certain ways. And I just didn't have time for that in 15 minutes. I think that what is really sticking with me recently is that page where the people, whether it's real or not, are sort of living in whale bone structures and homes. I think that there's something going forward that I need to think about more about this with Jonah and the whale. And I think there's this sort of interesting desire by some of these people, not just to possess the creature, but actually be possessed by it or contained by it. And maybe there's a safety there that surrendering to being surrounded by it. You're in some ways, you're in control of the situation if you're giving it yourself parameters in which to exist in relationship to the whale. Yeah, that sort of old idea of our object sort of owning us, I guess. Yeah, and Sarah, did you have any thoughts about the way that you so beautifully pointed us to the specificity of where these scenes were on the temple structures, but then you also are so beautifully saying, thinking about them as environments as a whole and thinking about the relationship of the image to the spatial environmental context in which it's situated. That's a lot. I'm not sure how to answer all of that. Yeah, so the location is, I'm not, I don't have a clear answer for that. I'm not sure yet why they are there. I think it may have something to do with, we do have earlier examples of elephants on lentils in other, well, not different. There are still locations of aesthetic practice in India. And so there's two ways in which I'm thinking about it. And one is like the elephant as the signifier for like this water. So the threshold of the temple is purifying kind of, you know, transition. So water kind of washes you out. And so in temples later, we're gonna have rivers guarding the doorway with the same function. And so maybe that's something that's kind of taken from previous monuments but kind of gathering more significance. Maybe. And what you're saying about the containment, it's interesting, I kind of have the same opinion as you that they're contained but barely, you know. So we have these images and in Bhubana, I'm sure a lot of scholars have noticed how the imagery kind of seems like pushed out of the frame, yes. And it's uncontainable. These elephants, these whales and these powerful kind of elements of nature we can encounter them. It's not really entirely on our terms sometimes, right? We find them because they're beached and so we can see them and photograph them but they're not for us to see all the time, yeah. Yes, so maybe we can just open it up quickly to any questions from the audience. So John, I wanted to ask all the way in the back here. I wanted to ask two sort of related questions. The first is sort of what kind of ideological work a beached whale does. And I'm wondering if you would agree that there is perhaps some sort of implicit reciprocal relationship between disasters at sea and beached whales that in some sense, right, this is a way of evening the odds. And I just wanted to also ask about the rather prominent display of the whale's penis in a lot of these prints, including a man standing on top of it and what kind of work that's doing. Thank you. The reciprocity thing is very, very interesting to me and I have to think about it some more. I do think that there's, I've been in the past very interested in sort of shipwrecks and early modern shipwrecks and lore around shipwrecks, although I'm not really working with it right now, but I do think that there are many situations in which tying back into what I was saying earlier about mythology, like shipwrecks get mythologized, their causes, and I guess that's briefly in the talk in terms of the idea of like a unicorn piercing the ship. So I do think that there is a sense sometimes in the texts that there's like a punishment or retribution or like that there's almost kind of a revenge to breaking down the whale that maybe represents a force that deeper out to sea has been against them, especially the Dutch having, in an ideal world they would have no shipwrecks and just constant commerce. The second point about the penis is very interesting. My committee members have also pointed out to me how like in the Yaka Motham print after the Goltzius drawing there's sort of a couple or like maybe a couple to be married or just married sort of standing right by the penis. And so I do think it's sort of symbolically laden probably in multiple ways. I think that probably initially they're just interested in how large it is, in general how large everything is. And then also I do think there's probably a deeper significance that I have to look into regarding to what extent, what economy was, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody somewhere was like eating it as like a medicinal thing. I just made that up, but they were often doing things not too dissimilar from that. So I would be sort of interested in sort of economical or sort of lucrative reasons around that or also with the couple standing near it, what sort of ideological or symbolic work it was doing there, yeah, thank you. I have a question for Ben. I was really compelled by your description of the painting as transparency, but I'm still trying to work out the role of the figures within that transparency. And I wondered about the idea of the fact that the figures in the Starotek, the figures being Bessarrian and two members of the squalor, presumably, they inhabit the same kind of pictorial world as the Starotek. Is there a kind of distinction that's being marked between who's worthy of seeing the thing unmediated and those of us who do not have that same kind of direct access to the unveiled relic? Yeah, thank you. I really kind of like what you're pointing out there. Yeah, and I had thought about, particularly when you look kind of look closer and you look at the fact that the two members of the squalor are behind the Starotek. So there is that kind of sense of three-dimensionality. And that said, I think on the back of the Starotek, you do have kind of an inscription that says this was donated by Cardinal Bessarrian. So it's definitely something I need to kind of think about and see how that kind of, yeah, what tension does that play against the kind of the argument of reputating to transparency? But yeah, I like that kind of idea of, yeah, they kind of have that more kind of direct mediation to the relics, it's almost as if they've kind of, they've got through the one, one of the processes is all veiling, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely something I need to think about and the role of portraiture as well more generally, I think, and questions for authenticity that come with those issues of portraiture and which are within the world of the relics is something that I'm going to kind of probe at more as well. But yeah, so those are some of the things I'm thinking about in relation to your question. Yeah, thank you. This is great, thank you for all your papers. I have a quick question for Sarah. If I'm not mistaken, it looked like some of the elephants or at least their fabrics and attributes, I guess, were painted on these temples. Is that the case where these things would have been painted much more brightly than just the dark stone it is today or is it was my eyes mistaking me? We can't know that. Well, I mean, there are traces of paint in some of the temples that I find in Bhubaneswar or that there are in Bhubaneswar. There is, I mean, I can't analyze when the paint is from or something, but I will say that, and this is maybe controversial to draw this parallel, but in India today, all of the temples are painted and there is this kind of aesthetic of color, which is, and so we can think that possibly it's possible that they were, I think maybe what you're seeing is more of the kind of just the stone is kind of falling apart. These are sandstone, it's really, really delicate and it just kind of comes away. I also have a question for Ben. Thank you for a really fascinating presentation. I'm wondering if there isn't a way in which the simulacrum of the panel isn't importantly not transparent. Given how important the whole question of truth is and authenticity around relics, the need for the glass is to show that there is indeed something within the reliquary and not only that, but it has some real claim to being what it says it is, what it is said to be. So if you've put something in front of it that is a replica of it, for the person who's opening the door, the replica will first set up a false identification of the thing. It's important to see that falsity. And then any kind of doubt that might be there about the truth of the actual relic might be dissipated once the door is opened and you see the actual glass. So even if you have any doubt about whether it's real or not, some of that might have been alleviated by having seen the replica first. Does that hold any water for you? Yeah, thank you so much. I really like the sort of nuancing that you're doing there. Yeah, and I think I need to kind of bring that in. There's definitely something I've been thinking about. A lot of my chapter, the expanded chapter is to do with this issue of authentication. And I think, yeah, so what you're saying is you can't really have kind of true authentication, true revelation without that element of doubt, I think. And so what this painting you could argue is doing is providing an element of, it's at least making it to be a question, I guess. And then kind of going through that, yeah, urging them to open the door to go through the process of revelation. Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. And I think I also need to kind of look more closely at, yeah, the way in which Gentile goes about representing these Byzantine passion narratives, which, and question the ways in which it's not completely accurate, not completely one-on-one. And there has been some interesting work done on the ways in which, you know, rock crystal relic rees, you know, they don't provide complete transparency onto the relics, they manipulate them in certain ways, they, you know, make them appear larger, for example. So, you know, I kind of, you know, I wanna keep the transparency argument, but at the same time, there are ways of nuancing it, I think, which, yeah, thank you for kind of pointing towards that. Yeah, thank you. Hi, thank you for your papers. I hope this is a kind of fun, speculative question at the end of the day. One, I'm wondering if the glass reliquary is an antecedent to the modern vitrine, and that it's emphasizing the aspect of display as opposed to haptic or other relationships one might have with the object. And then for the whole panel, I'm thinking about synecdoche and whether, in a way, the part stands for a whole when thinking about ivories or scrimshaws or these sort of impossibly large creatures, and the same is true with relics as well, where a tiny bit is standing for something much larger. Well, I'll sort of answer the first part of the question first. Yes, so I kind of like what you're kind of pointing towards that, and it is something I've kind of toyed with in a playful way, I guess. I mean, I've kind of been thinking about the idea of, yeah, the glass reliquary and what it shows behind it as kind of this antecedent for the work of art behind the sheet of glass, a pane of glass. Obviously, and that's kind of playing into a certain teleology of this idea of the relic becoming in the modern day work of art. I pointed towards those examples from the 14th century, whereby you do have these parchment miniatures, these narratives of the passion, and they are seen behind, yeah, panes of transparent rock crystal. So that's definitely kind of a connection that I like thinking about, yeah, the modern day work of art in the art museum. Yeah, kind of being framed by transparent glass and all the kind of connotations that come with that. Or even our wonderful example from last night of a large-scale vitrine with the cotton gin inside. So I think there's some wonderful dovetailing that we have, just go ahead. Yeah, so I can pass on it. My heart leapt a tiny bit when you said synecdoche. I had a moment of terror when writing this, and I wrote, it was a metonym, and then I was like, or do I mean synecdoche? And then I Googled them both, and it was like, wait, what do they each mean? So it's really helpful, yeah. I think that that's exactly what's happening with a lot of the fragmenting and collecting, that there's a sort of part standing in for the whole, and goes back to the sort of first question about that, which can't be represented, must be represented by sort of most emblematic piece, or most accessible piece, whether it's the sort of ivory or the skeleton, or the penis, or the eye, or yeah. Yeah, and same. So the, in general, working with these reliefs as this kind of sort of tangle of correspondences, right, that you're working with, and sometimes it's also just useful to see them as all, like, okay, these are all signifiers, and they're just kind of layered on top of each other. Yeah, but definitely the elephant signs the forest, the tusk would sign the elephant, yeah. Question for John, which is actually strangely related to the question that was just asked. And just to give you a sense for where I'm coming from, I actually quite loved the narwhal that you showed us, the sea unicorn example. It made me think of the Baba Nama, where Baba is describing the various crocodiles in India, and one of them he describes as a Shrabi, or a tiger crocodile, and there's a wonderful representation of the Baba Nama, which shows us a depiction of literally what looks like a tiger in the water. And so that, and the question that raises for me is to what extent is there a kind of actual, lived experiential knowledge of the thing that is being depicted by the artist who is doing the depicting? And so the question that I had for you, which I think is actually related to this question of synactity, is to what extent would somebody, you know, would a viewer have necessarily had the opportunity to see a whale in its whole and entirety? And to what extent does that, the seeing of the piece become a way of knowing that may or may not have been possible in the real world? Yeah, thank you. The first thing that immediately comes to mind is that the sort of whale carcass that I really briefly mentioned being hung in Elogea in Florence in 1550. I guess in that case, people quite publicly were able to encounter sort of a whole, as far as I know, whole carcass, with the skeleton was sort of reassembled separately from it so they could encounter sort of carcass and skeleton. I don't know that moments like that were common. I mean, I guess encountering the beached whale on the beach, that's part of why it's such a spectacle because there's the whole thing, but I guess what really comes to mind for me with your question and tying back to sort of Hommé's question is my sort of side or main project actually about ivories and narwhal ivories. As far as what I know, the sort of chain of trade and working was such that the carvers were frequently receiving sort of raw ivory separately from any other sort of piece of the animal and so in the medieval period, generally, I think sort of walrus and narwhal tusks were coming from Iceland and Greenland and sort of hunters would keep the horn attached to the skull for a while because that's what was easiest to carry, but then by the time it reaches sort of a skilled carver, it's sort of quite removed from an animal. And so I think in terms of sort of ivory turners or ivory workers, there's a very distanced relationship from is this a unicorn? Is this a whale? What is this? But then I guess I'll try to end my answer, but then I guess it becomes more complicated in the 17th century with like olivarum publishes that the narwhal is a whale, not a unicorn and I don't know enough as of yet as to exactly how sort of like what specimens or what degrees of the whole animal by which she comes to those conclusions, but yeah. You know, so we have come, I think, to the end of a really long and wonderful and fruitful day. So I just want to very briefly, I'm sort of brimming with gratitude for everyone to say first and foremost, thank you so much to the graduate students at this final panel, which I think, you know, caps things beautifully into everyone all day for all of your wonderful papers. I would certainly second Pamela Lee's sentiment earlier today that feeling that the field is in good hands. So thank you all so much. I know she, I think she just had to slip out, but I do want to, you know, couldn't end things without thanking Pamela Lee for really her extraordinary intellectual leadership over the past two days and for really framing our discussion. I know we put the keynote speaker really to work in this symposium and I'm really, I feel really lucky and grateful for Pamela's thoughts over the past two days. Also, of course, a thank you to everyone at the Barnes Foundation. I want to second everyone and their thanks to Aliyah for really kind of keeping us all on track and organizing this all so beautifully. Also, a thank you to Kaelin for moderating this morning. Naina, thank you so much for jumping into the fray and for your moderation this afternoon. I want to thank very much Brynmar for being the convener this year and a special thanks also to Lisa Saltzman. Your opening remarks this morning were so heartening to me, I must say, to hear about what is special about this symposium. Our graduate symposium and for your real interest and desire to be at the Barnes Foundation, to work at the Barnes Foundation. This is really for us the best part of what we get to do. I know we will be buzzing with all of the ideas that you all have introduced into this space for I think weeks to come. We have so much now to kind of chew on. So I'm very, very grateful for that. And so I think with that, I mean, to my mind, this really is the start of a conversation. But I think it's probably time for everyone to go and have a happy hour. So thank you so, so much. I'm going to give this to Kaelin.