 Welcome to another edition of Barnes Takeout. My name is Kaylyn Jewel. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to talk about some of the ancient objects that are on display in gallery number 15 and we'll go into gallery 16 for just a moment. But here we see gallery 15. We are looking at the east wall. Gallery 15 is filled with all kinds of different works of art. We've got lots of great paintings by Matisse, by Cézanne, some American painters like John Cain. But what I wanted to spend the next few minutes talking about are these ceramic pots that are on display in the glass case along the east wall of gallery 15. And we're gonna look more closely at this one here. So here it is. And it's an object that was made in the ancient Greek world. It was made sometime in the second half of the fourth century BCE. And it is made out of terracotta. It was thrown on a potter's wheel. We can get a sense of that manufacture if we look at it a little bit more closely. One of the things I love about this example is that the rim or the lip of the upper opening of the neck of this vessel is a little bit wobbly. And we can get a sense. Those of you who may have made objects on potter's wheels might know that sometimes it's hard to get it centered. And the fact that it's very soft and filled with the clay has a lot of water in it at that moment makes it sometimes a little bit difficult to deal with and to handle. And so we can see a little bit of that happening with this kind of asymmetrical wobbly opening at the top. So we're getting a sense of really the artist who made this. If we look down, you can see that we've got these really great, tall, thin handles which are called strap handles, which were applied to the vessel after it was finished on the potter's wheel. If we go down, we can see this really fabulous, pretty intricate and elaborate decoration, which we'll come back to in a second. And then we can see that it is resting on a sort of delicate foot down here at the bottom. The overall shape of this object is known as an amphora. And an amphora in the ancient world, whether it's the ancient Greek world or the ancient Roman world, were really used as storage jars. They were, in many cases, kind of like the cardboard boxes of the ancient world. But what we see here is a very elaborate version. And it's in a remarkably good state of preservation. There aren't a lot of cracks in it. We get an indication, if we look at one of these handles, that maybe this handle had broken at some point and there's a little bit of a break here and was repaired. Again, we don't know when it was repaired, but at some point it had been. And these types of vessels, these amphora, have different proportions. And the version that we see here is very tall and slender. And we can get a sense of that tall cylindrical proportions by the decoration that is on the surface. So this sort of tall element here in the center of the object, the elongated thin handles that we already looked at, this delicate little foot down at the bottom sort of gives it a sort of stretched out quality to it. And those slender proportions have led art historians who specialize in this material to connect these types of vessels to the region of Apulia or Apulia in southern Italy. So we're talking about what corresponds to the boot of the Italian peninsula. And it's interesting to think about ancient Greek material appearing in Italian places. So Apulia in the ancient Greek world was one of the first colonies that the ancient Greeks formed after they left their kind of mainland and the islands in the Aegean. And so when we see these types of objects, these ones that are very elaborate, they are painted on all sides. This is the side that is facing us when we go into the gallery, but let's look at a side view of it. And here you can see that underneath those strap handles, we've got this decorative motif, which looks vegetal and it's a palmet. We see a similar palmet on the upper part of the neck, and there would be a palmet. If you looked at this object on the other side, you would see a palmet on the other side. So let's figure out this decoration because the decoration is sort of helping to explain what this object had been used for. We can see here, and I'm just gonna focus on this central scene. We can see here we have two human figures who are represented on either side of this tall rectangular monument that is set up on a plinth. You can see that the figures here are standing on the ground, but they're lifting their legs up to place them on top of this little plinth or this platform. You can see that the female figure is holding some kind of a fabric ribbon, and she seems to be walking towards the central element. While the male figure on the left is holding up a little bottle and sort of looks like he's pouring it onto this object. So what on earth is going on here? What we are seeing is a funerary scene. We are seeing a representation of something known as a funerary steely, or you can think of it kind of like an ancient tombstone. And these were set up in cemeteries or necropolis in the ancient Greek world, and they were often visited by family members of the deceased, and they were often decorated. So what you see here is the decorating and these sort of ritual libations that are being paid, these votive offerings that are being paid to this deceased person. We don't know who it is. We don't know the identity of either of these figures because we don't have any inscriptions, but we are generally seeing here a representation of a funeral scene or people coming back after a funeral had occurred. And we can also get a sense of the type design that is represented here. This type of amphora is often referred to as a pan-aphanatic amphora, and that is a reference to vessels that were given as prizes for different kinds of athletic competitions. So this would be like a trophy. These forms would be like trophies that were given. They were filled with oil, often perfumed, and they were given to victorious athletes. And so the one we are seeing here was not used for that purpose, but it sort of hearkens back to that idea, especially if we look at the other side. So let's look at the back. And what you see on the back, which you can't see when you're in the gallery, so it's nice that we've got these pictures of the back, what you see here are two male figures that are covered up in these big robes that are called hemations, and between them this curious little symbol. And it's not actually a symbol. What you're seeing are jumping weights, and they are weights that were used by athletes in ancient Greek athletic competitions. And we have several of them that survive in the archaeological record, and I'll show you a picture of a pair of them that are on display in the Archaeological Museum in Athens. So you can see here, this is where the athletes would hold them, and they would use them as a way of kind of propelling them forward in things like the long jump and other jumping competitions in the ancient world. So one other aspect that I wanna point to is this little object here that the male figure on the left is holding, and then it's a little, it's a bottle. It's a type of bottle known as a Lechithos, and it's an oil bottle. We have several, there are three Lechithoi that are on display in gallery 16, which is right next door to gallery 15. So I'm just gonna show you gallery 16 for a second. This is the North Wall, and you can see two of them on display in the glass case. So you can see the tall one here, and then a smaller one here, and you can see that distinctive handle there. So again, these are the types of bottles that would be used by people visiting funerary monuments. They would be filled with oil, and this oil would be poured onto the funerary steely. So when we return back to this object, what we are seeing are two people who are engaging in the kind of memory of the deceased person. We also know, and I'll sort of wrap up with this, we also know that this vessel itself is hollow. So the bottom here is actually open, which means we know that this vessel specifically was also used within a funerary context. So the Lechithoi that you see in the male figure here holding would have, if you imagine a person visiting one of these monuments, there would have been an amphora like this on display next to the big steely kind of on this plinth, and a Lechithoi could have been used to pour perfumed oil into this object. And by doing so, the fact that it is open at the bottom allowed the oil to seep onto the ground below it and into the ground below it. So it's a way of connecting the earthly realm with the realm of the deceased. So it's really an interesting object when we think about it in those terms. So when you come back to the barns, I would keep an eye out for all of these interesting vessels that are on display, because they really give us a sense of how ancient people, in this case how ancient Greeks, were dealing with their deceased loved ones and how they were using these objects that we see on display. So thanks for joining me today, and be sure to stay tuned for another Barns Takeout. Take care. Thanks for watching, and for your support of the Barns Foundation.