 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barn's Takeout. My name's Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher. Today we're going into room number three, a corner room on the first floor. To look at this little painting, originally a piece of a larger altarpiece entitled The Meeting of St. Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. It was painted in the early 1500s by a German artist, an important German artist named Hans von Kulmach, who was a prominent student of the super famous Albrecht Dürer along with actually the artist of this Madonna and child over here, a person called Hans Baldum Green. And before launching into a deeper discussion of an individual painting, I do like to think about how it fits visually and conceptually into its ensemble. Albert Barn's is named for the way that he arranged the paintings and other objects within any given room or wall. And formally, I think for me the first thing that kind of jumps out to my mind is the series of arches that we can see from the desk down here, up to the arch in the Golden Gate in our own picture. Perhaps we even see it in the sort of bouffant of this lady, the fabulous lady right up here. And then repeated in this wonderful lock made in France by Gustave Marot. And I want to dwell for just a second on this, because the lock features salamanders that are breathing flames surrounded by flames crowned by flames up here. And that's because people used to believe that salamanders were fireproof and therefore impervious to like the burn of temptation. And this sort of narrative of virtue of right being in the world is something that I think emerges in many of these paintings, whether or not it connects to the supernatural as in ours, or certain perhaps ideals of femininity that we might see in this Renoir picture of embroiderers here or in this lady up here. So I'd like to think about this theme of, I suppose, virtue and redemption. So let's go a little bit closer at our picture. So again, saints to Amna Joisin and Anna meeting at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. So who are they? These are actually the parents of the Virgin Mary and in the Christian tradition. And the scene itself is based on a book called The Proto-Vingelian of James. It's not a canonical gospel now. It was actually written in Greek in probably the middle of the second century CE as a way of filling out the story of the Virgin Mary that the canonical gospels touched on only pretty quickly and loosely, I suppose, because theologically to flesh out who Mary was was another way of, I think, quite literally fleshing out who Christ was and how his divine and human natures may have related to each other. And so in the story of the Proto-Vingelian of James, it opens with a joy team trying to make an offering to the temple. He's rejected because he doesn't have any children yet. And so he strikes out into the desert for 40 days of prayer and fasting. Meanwhile, his wife, Anna, and I think we should know that at this point, the two of them are beyond natural childbearing age, is in her garden awaiting the return of her husband praying by a laurel tree, which is a conventional symbol of a victory and ended up in the Christian belief symbolizing the ultimate triumph over death that Christ introduced. So she's praying beneath this tree for a child and says that whatever it is, a girl or a boy, if I do have a child, then I'll consecrate her or him to the temple. And so an angel comes, makes the announcement that she will have a baby and her husband gets the same news. And so the moment that we see is when he is rushing in from the desert, she goes to the edge of the city walls, they meet and embrace in this, I think, lovely and a very human moment of excitement, of tenderness about this miraculous expectation of a child called the Immaculate Conception. And I'm going to move now to another picture. Looking at this right hand panel, you probably are actually able to tell why that this is the same artist. And it was, as a matter of fact, very common for artists to replicate certain scenes by the use of drawings, for example. So here's another image of the visitation. And we get to see over here in the left hand valve of this triptych, now we've got St. St. St. Washington and Anna having consecrated the Virgin Mary to the Temple of Jerusalem when she's a little girl. And so it's filling out more of the narrative for us and perhaps the piece that we have at the barns would have originally belonged to some sort of ensemble like this. And I should note too that this whole thing is most likely a 19th century confection. Normally, the earlier scene would be to the left and later one to the right, so we could read it like a book. But I like this because we do get to see the Immaculate Conception, its Consequence of Consecrating the Child. And this is where the Virgin Mary stayed until she was 12 years old and got married to Joseph. And many of us know what the Gospel say happened after that where she gave birth to Christ. And we can see the Virgin Mary now crowned Queen of Heaven up here for his ultimate sacrifice on the cross as a way of making human salvation and participation in Heaven possible, again, according to belief. And so here's Christ on the cross with the other members of the trinity. We get to see his human incarnation down here. And here he is amidst the company of a whole bunch of other saints, many of them with martyrs with the emblems by which they were put to death as witnesses to him. And then one more thing that I think I'd like to look at is this piece that we have also at the Barnes Foundation. This one you're going to find in the next room on the meeting at the Golden Gate. And it's the presentation now of Christ in the temple. So there he is as a little baby being presented here to the priest. Here's a prophetess that had recognized him as being divine. We have his mother now, the Virgin Mary, echoing the composition of her own parents in the past one accompanied by his adoptive father, Joseph, who's bringing an offering of turtle dubs in a basket. This is something from the Gospel of Luke where if you were relatively poor and they were as a family of carpenters, you'd bring turtle dubs. And then I think this marvelous detail of this angel, probably great Gabriel, embracing the Virgin Mary as I think a kind of witness to the miraculous nature of her pregnancy, plus the doctrine that when the bread and wine of mass Christ's body is sacrificed on the altar, the angels are actually present. And we're supposed to make that liturgical connection because of not just because of the altar, but because the prophetess here is holding this big candle taper. And this is the presentation of Christ is an event, a liturgical event known as candle mess. And so with these images that we've been looking at, they offer us kind of the best of late medieval art to my mind where they're incredibly instructive in terms of theology. But in order for a belief to be effective, people believed that you had to feel right feelings too. And I think that's where the humanity of these images comes in. So that's it for today's takeout. And thank you so much for listening.