 I am Adam Levine. I'm the associate director at the Toledo Museum of Art, but I am also the associate curator of ancient art, and I'm here with our conservator. Hi, I'm Suzanne Hargrove. I'm head of conservation here at the Toledo Museum of Art. And we are here to just keep rolling? Sure. All right. We are here to talk to you about some ancient art, which is good for me, and specifically about garnets, those fabulous red stones, which were used, as we can see here, in some examples from the Hellenistic period, straight through to the Byzantine period. So a note on nomenclature. Of course, we are, as you may have heard, we refer to the Byzantines as Byzantines, but that is a totally modern construction. The Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans, and called themselves Romanitas, right up until Constantinople fell in 1453. So it's no surprise to see continuity over here, the better part of a millennium. Okay. So we have five objects here, or five pairs of objects, groupings of objects, I should say, diadem, a Hellenistic diadem, roughly contemporaneous garnet image of Heracles. A pair of earrings, they're called navicella earrings, because they're shaped like the keel of a boat. Okay. So we have a lovely little folly, which is probably related to a suite of objects called grioi, G-R-Y-L-L-O-I. It does not look like it sounds, which are sort of two-headed fantastical creatures, normally cut into stone, normally in an intaglio process, and this magnificent 6th century, hard to imagine, it's for anyone other than the Imperial Court, open work gold bracelet, the open work is a technique called opus intresile, with magnificent emeralds and sapphires and pearls, but also, of course, garnets. There's much to say about each of these objects individually, but focusing on garnet in particular. What is of note is that if you look at these rough chronological progression, what you see is you see the interest in garnet persists, and part of the reason for the interest in garnet is the rich redness of the stone. Well, it is imbued with different symbolic values depending on the cultural and religious system. Broadly speaking, red is considered a significant culture in many different religions around the world today, and it was just so in late antiquity, but really there's something about the contrast that that red provides with gold, which seems to provide a real sort of warmth and aesthetic appeal, which you can see used in widely varying styles. The diadem features a rather small garnet. It would have been worn as a headdress, that's what a diadem was, and probably would have been given on the occasion of a wedding to a bride. The diadem itself is actually fabricated in seven parts. The garnet is set into this knot at the center, known as a Heracles knot, and not associated with the mythical demigod Heracles. And since it's difficult to undo. Because it's difficult or impossible to untie, and it is probably in this instance a symbol of the love of the two people getting married, and that garnet at the center therefore could be interpreted as the love itself, or the preciousness of the relationship, etc. Here we have an image of Heracles himself. You can see that the bottom has been pierced, so we think this probably would have sat on a pedestal of some sort. Okay. It is probably not in jewelry, and it's hard to imagine how it would have been worn. Its use remains a mystery, but we do know that there were sort of shrines in homes, particularly in the Roman period. And it's not impossible to imagine. So it could be like in a lararium, like a household dye? Potentially. The best part about our jobs is we can come up with all sorts of hypotheses, and as long as they're not falsifiable, no one can tell us we're wrong. So it could have been a larus, but also could have been decorative. The people who lived in antiquity were people, and people would have collected, people would have liked luxury items, people, the whole idea of the medieval or the Renaissance medieval, these people had collecting impulses then, just as we do today. Well, and there are wonderful examples, and other types of gemstones like amethyst, rock crystal, and calcidity. That's exactly some of which, unfortunately, are not in this particular shot, but are just nearby. And then just sort of rounding things out. We have these extraordinarily heavy earrings, hard to imagine, precisely when they would have been worn. If you're able to zoom in, you can see these two lovely birds. I'm sure that someone could attribute those birds, perhaps they're sort of egrets of sorts, or doves, but unbelievably fine worksmanship and granulation, those little dots that have been placed on them, but sort of generalized birds, nothing overly specific in my view about the iconography, but sort of showing some of this eastern influence, these heraldic two animals centered around this projected, elevated, teardrop-shaped garnet. And this would have been a tremendous statement of wealth and power on the part of perhaps the husband of the lady wearing these. That's exactly right. Much akin to our now four centuries later, but no less extraordinary bracelet or arm cuff. I have pretty big wrists, and you can see that. You can probably get my wrists through there pretty easily. Suzanne will carefully remove to show. I love the inner details, too. It's just phenomenal. So this would have been produced unlike, so there are different methods for working metal. There's hammering, if you say. There's sort of working with a chisel after the fact, chasing. But here you see piercework. You see the same thing in the Navicella earrings as well. I think, and right, Suzanne is also a metal worker, so she can comment. But one of the great hallmarks of great piercework is not just the fineness of detail. And in this case, the ornateness of the geometric pattern. But it's also, it's hard to tell from which direction the thing was pierced. Right. You don't get those rough edges. It feels almost manufactured, when in fact, the amount of time that was spent creating a perfect object, a seamless experience for the wearer. The absence of anything is the presence of a great deal of work, so to speak. And our final object is this massive garnet. Just, although the workmanship may not be quite the same as our delicate sort of Heracles just above, the size of it is extraordinary. And in fact, you can see there are some widely different, widely varying sizes here. Really sort of luxury arts explode after Alexander's conquest and the East. The amount of wealth that those conquests were able to commute back to the Hellenistic Empire created this interest and decadence and inconspicuous consumption. Right. And in fact, the Athenians had sumptuary laws, so this is sort of brushing that all away. That's right. Sumptuary laws that they sometimes didn't adhere to, of course. Laws are meant to be broken. Right. But the influx of wealth at the scale of an empire as opposed to the scale of a very powerful city state with its treasuries, et cetera, was unprecedented. And Pliny sort of remarked that it was sort of this decadence which ultimately resulted in the fall of the Roman Empire. You can see the traces of that here, even if the history isn't quite right and maybe the causes aren't either. But with this persistence of interest and garnets, as the empire orients itself further and further to the East over time, there's the capacity for larger and larger garnets. Right. The center for large garnet production or mining in the world was and remains India. And there are garnets from elsewhere, including the modern day Czech Republic in particular. Right. But I know most of them are traceable to Rajasthan. Yeah. That's exactly right. But that trade really only opens up with Rome in volume in the second century. Okay. So it's really at the second century that you start seeing these really large garnets appearing on the market. Right. Emeralds, right? Sapphires also had eastern extraction. Emeralds were particularly prized if they were from Cyprus, the great sort of mines. But all of these gems have stories. There's a wonderful book from the mid-80s, an edited one called The Social Life of Things. Right. And it focuses very much on sort of made objects. But all of these objects have their own biographies and all of these objects have constituent parts that each have their own biographies. Right. And I think about where these things came from and how they were assembled. It makes it all the more remarkable. Oh, yeah. That's something that this is a statement of how much wealth and trade can be commanded to bring all of these disparate elements together. Which is exactly why it's hard to imagine. This stunning craftsmanship. How could it be for anyone other than, you know, I joke, I can't tell you that Empress Theodora or someone in her court wore that. But you can't tell me someone did it. She would wear, yes. That's right. Oh, yeah. That's right. Well, and we even see representations of her in enormous earrings like the ones that we're seeing here. That's right. And even if there's an opportunity for you to cut in a shot of the Mosaics in San Vitale and Modena. Oh, yeah. She and her court, you'll see sort of deck it in to bracelets like this alluded to. Oh, yeah. I mean, her get-up is not quite as... She's dripping, yeah. She is dripping with pearls and what we can only assume are large garments. Yeah.