 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to session two. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director of research interpretation and education at the Barnes and I'm going to be moderating this second session today. We've got a very interesting diversity of topics ranging from Italian Renaissance fresco to 19th century American blackboard drawing to Byzantine manuscripts. We will be inviting you to ask questions or make comments in the chat and then once all three speakers have finished, we will have a discussion, everybody together. So it's my pleasure now to introduce Dr. Marsha Hall who is a professor at Temple University to introduce her student today's for this session's first speaker, Suzanne Williver. I'm Marsha Hall of Temple University. I want to thank those of you at the Barnes who persevered and rescued last year's symposium. It would have been a lot easier to give a virtual shrug and say, well, sorry kids, wrong year. I know that those who had been preparing eagerly to present their papers and were canceled within a week or two of the symposium were deeply disappointed. Suzanne Williver was one of those from last year. She defended her dissertation on Raphael's Galatea in the spring. Her committee, Tracy Cooper, Ashley West and I were deeply, deeply impressed with the extent and the findings of her dissertation. Suzanne in her first life was a graphic designer. And so she set out initially to study the reception of the fresco of Raphael in the prints that were made of it. But as happens with dissertations, she found a great deal of neglected material along the way, including literary sources. By the time I had received four chapters and the prints had not been mentioned, I panicked. Fortunately, they appeared in the final and very satisfying concluding chapter. She made discoveries along the way, which astonished even me and I thought I knew this fresco quite well. And one of those is the subject of her material today, her paper entitled Intermediality and Transformation and Raphael as Pygmalion, Galatea in the Villa Farnesina. I give you Suzanne. Thank you. And I would like to echo Marsha Hall's sentiments and thanking the Barnes organizers for bringing the symposium together and for allowing those of us who were meant to present last year to do so. A special thank you to Alia Palombo for excellent organizational skills. To Gillan and Thomas, the entire tech team for working their technological magic today to Dr. Martha Lucie for moderating. And of course, to Dr. Marsha Hall for the very kind introduction and for many, many years of mentorship. My paper today is drawn from my dissertation and revisits an iconic fresco building upon the work of many brilliant scholars before. Raphael's Galatea, located in the Villa of wealthy Papal banker Agassino Kijian Rome became a canonical work of the high Renaissance. It was revered quickly as an exemplar of grace and beauty, of Raphael's masterful approach to invention and imitation of antiquity and increasingly for his excellence in colorito and chased painting practices. The remarkable work has inspired interpretation and response for centuries, but despite its renown, many details of the artist's achievement became obscured. Among these is the significance of the dramatic color shift in the drapery covering Galatea's thigh. Technical analysis has shown the coloring is mostly accurate, apart from the darkening of some great highlights in the shadows. No one has yet explained this detail sufficiently. However, understanding its purpose unlocks the depth of this works meaning as it functioned within the Villa Farnacina and within Raphael's career. This paper examines the color choice as part of a sophisticated and complex response to an intertextual and an intermedial dialogue that extended beyond this loja. I will demonstrate how this crucial detail, one, makes claims for Raphael as a modern Pygmalion. Two, argues for the superiority of painting over other media. And three, reveals how the fresco offers a meta discourse on artistic transformation. First, we must understand the context of this commission. Agostino Chidi desired to establish both a noble identity and a lineage to ancient Rome through every aspect of his suburban Della. Elaborate banquets, a secret garden, theater, music, poetry, and of course art. Christophe Fremont once called the Villa Farnacina a gizamtke's work, a total work of art. In a loja once opened to the garden along the river, Chidi hired a range of artists to create a Galleria Antica, a picture gallery inspired by antiquity that encouraged artistic collaboration and rivalry. From his native Siena, Chidi employed Baldessari Peruzzi who had designed the building to depict the patron's horoscope of all Antica on the ceiling. In 1511, he brought Sebastiano del Piombo to Rome from Venice to paint stories of transformation from Ovid's metamorphosis in the lunettes. Shortly thereafter, shortly thereafter, he commissioned Sebastiano and Raphael to paint Polyphemus and Galatea on the panels below. For the paired wall frescoes, the artists engaged in both emulation and rivalry, a pedagone with each other and with their myriad sources across a variety of media. In doing so, they situated themselves and Chidi within the lineage from ancient Rome to the present. The subject is drawn from the mythological story of Polyphemus and Galatea, a tale of unrequited love in which an uncouth and lonely giant becomes hopelessly enamored with a beautiful sea nymph and seeks to woo her, typically in vain. With no visual precedents to follow, Sebastiano and Raphael created a solution rooted in the literary tradition, drawing from the ancient poems of theocratists, Ovid and Philistratus to the modern version of Angelo Poliziano. Visually, Sebastiano's Polyphemus may draw upon Michelangelo's Inuiti in the Sistine ceiling frescoes, Raphael's Apollo in Parnassus as Alexis Colotta has proposed, and the Belvedere torso. Raphael, of course, would not be outdone. He expanded his references dramatically, drawing upon a network of sources ranging from monumental antique sculptures and marine theme surf kafakai to drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures by his contemporaries. He responded to Peruzzi and Sebastiano, but also to Andrea Mantegna, Baudicelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo and their engagement with antiquity to create an epic battle allantica. While Sebastiano had incorporated his sources subtly into his soft, sensuous coloring that would have blended in well with the once open loges and surrounding gardens, Raphael distinguished his work as a painting set apart from its companion. First, through its symmetry and the disjointed horizon line, but especially through a now lost architectural frame that once established the work almost as a quadribo-tato, a painting within a painting, fictively hung on a wall in Kiji's Galleria Antica. Like Mantegna and Baudicelli before him, Raphael may have wished to emulate a lost antique painting. In this case, one described by Philistratus the Elder in Imagines. Through his emphasis, Philistratus brought Polyphemus to life as a voyeuristic admirer of the unknowing Gallatea who was painted playing on the sea. Noticing how, quote, her arms are gently rounded and her breasts project, nor yet is beauty lacking in her thigh. Raphael's harmonious color scheme focuses our attention on the figure of Gallatea, who is wrapped in a deep red drape, while a dramatic transition in color draws attention to her elevated thigh. Yet Raphael did not depict that thigh's sensuous flesh as we might expect, but rather as a silvery blue stone colored drapery. The reason for this becomes clearer as we understand that this fresco also emulates sculpture, from the majestic Gallatea in the center to the writhing figures around her, to the circling puti that seemed to form a triumphal arch above. The work presents as a monumental sculpture based in color, more than a painting bound by the limits of the wall. The water even appears as if carved from stone, most evident where the sea center's hosts sit on top of it. Some elements maintain the flat stone-like qualities of relief sculpture, such as the nude bust of the Nariad on the left, and especially the back of the Nariad on the right. Raphael transformed the familiar Barrily format into a monumental sculpture, set in three-dimensional space and in vivid color. He thus created a work that seems to hover between media. Similar to Perusia and Sebastiano in the previous frescoes, Raphael restored and reimagined antique sculptures, yet he went a step further, suggesting the sculptural material and the fragmentary state of these familiar remnants. He divided the Giornate, the section that constitutes a single day's work, of his Gallatea to cut the drapery into two sections with the folds across her belly. This is an approach akin to that taken in antique sculptures to hide the seam where two blocks of marble are attached. We might explain this clever use of the Giornate to describe transitions, but elsewhere, the solution seems to draw attention to itself. For example, similar to Sebastiano, Raphael quoted the Belvedere torso, but rather than subordinating it to the illusionism of pastoral painting, Raphael drew attention to its fragmented state. He divided the Giornate over the sculptures truncated and then added a fin in place of the lower leg. In the companion Narayan, Raphael quoted a Venus of Rhodes, and the head of this nymph appears oddly attached to her neck, her arms seeming to belong to a different torso. These aspects have drawn criticism from scholars, yet here, the strangeness exists within a single Giornata and seems more deliberate. Raphael also quoted an antique sarcophagus fragment and cleverly crafted at the knees. Even little Puto in the foreground has an ambiguous relationship to the tail behind him, which may belong as easily to him or to the dolphin. The pervasive oddities here suggests that Raphael deliberately allowed the material nature of the remnants to remain visible on the surface of the work and that he sought to draw attention of his process of assembly and transformation. Then we find Galatea at the center, who stands apart from her companions as a figure at once idealized and yet more real. This returns us again to Galatea's thigh, to that dramatic shift that Raphael employed from the deep red drape to the silvery gray blue, which closely resembles the color used for his memorial horse. We may find a more nuanced reading of this detail and the fresco as a whole by taking a look at Blosio Palladio's poem, Seppur Bannum, Augustini Kisi. Published in January of 1512, the poem is often used to date the Galatea after this because the poet did not mention the fresco. However, we have yet to consider Raphael's painting as a response to Palladio's poem. The poet briefly described the recently completed vault and lunettes by Peruzzi and Sebastiano, lauding the painter's ability to bring these figures to life, surpassing both nature and sculpture. Palladio observed how even the ancient sculptor, Pygmalion, would prefer these to his ivory bride. He compared the painters to the Roman poet Ovid, yet despite the praise, Palladio conflated the two painters into one without a name, writing, quote, then these whom the verses of Ovid painted, the painter repainted, and he equaled and skilled the Ovidian colors. So fortunate the painter is by the poet as the poet by the painter, end quote. Between the brief mention of the decorations within the poem as a whole and the obliteration of the painter's identities, Palladio claimed the superiority of poetry to painting. Raphael could hardly allow that to stand. Instead, he responded to the Pygmalion reference. According to Ovid, Pygmalion created a sculpture so beautiful and pure that he became enamored with it. He prayed to Venus to transform his sculpture into a real woman, and then he watched in disbelief as his sculpture transformed to life before his eyes, offering artists a moral warning to be aware of their own talent. Ovid did not identify his sculpture as Galatea, and indeed she was only named overtly as such in the 18th century. But Raphael seems to have suggested this association here. Understood in this light, it becomes clear that Galatea's elevated knee is shown in the process of transforming from stone into flesh or stone into drapery. Furthermore, Raphael's memorial horse is not just a quotation of Montaigne's engraving or of an antique relief, but a commentary on the process of transformation itself enhanced by pointing to Peruzzi's frozen horse in the vault, which his Medusa had transformed into stone. The reference to Pygmalion within the work also situates Raphael more specifically within the lineage of sculptors. He cast himself in the role of Pygmalion and rivaled him in paint. Pharoah is a humanist. Celio Calconini may have had this idea or even this painting in mind when he wrote his epigram to Raphael upon the artist's death, declaring that, quote, he, Raphael, brought forth by his hand live faces from marble. A live visage breathed from his pictures, end quote. Though this has been understood as an unusual reference to Raphael as a marble sculptor, it may instead suggest Raphael's ability to transform the marble sculptures of antiquity into living flesh in paint. It was through paint enhanced by his collaboration with Marcantonio Ramondi on engravings, which were understood as a form of sculpture that Raphael rivaled Michelangelo on his own terms. Raphael thus expressed his self-awareness of the medium enacted further by the frame that once declared the fresco work of art. His painting conveys a meta-discourse on the artistic process of assimilation and sources of sources and transformation of antiquity with particular focus on the materials themselves. In doing so, he demonstrated that he could communicate complex ideas and emotions with immediacy through his painted image. An idea aligned with Leonardo's declarations on the superiority of painting has expressed in on painting. Raphael conveyed multiple versions of the literary story while providing a visual image that was equally complex in its cross-temporal references to works in sculpture, print, and paint. There is an oft-quoted letter probably written by Raphael's friend and courtier, Baldassari Castiglione, in which the artist explained his charity idea in this work, his process of imitation and assembling. Drawing from the ancient painter, Zucces, Raphael declared that to paint a beautiful woman he must draw from several. This letter offers a kind of manifesto that explains the process behind creating the idealized Galatea in the fresco, or as one scholar observed, to the restoration of antique fragments. We can understand now how the work itself draws attention to the act of transformation driven home by the reference to Pygmalion. As we have seen, one long overlooked detail of Raphael's iconic work bears a significance that dramatically enhances our understanding of it. Galatea responded to the discourse on intermediality, already underway in this space, and the theme of metamorphosis that was essential to the space was also crucial to Raphael's artistic process. We find that expressed in the final work. Raphael's complete intermedial experience claims the superiority of painting, over sculpture, and poetry. We find a painting framed but not mobile, a collection of sculptures not in fragments but restored, and we watch the materials transform in the artist's parallel to obits metamorphosis. Raphael emphasized that point with a color transition on Galatea's thigh, responding to Blosio Palladio's poem and the story of Pygmalion. Raphael showcases the process of assembly and transformation in the Galatea, declaring his ability to transform sculpture into paint and even into living flesh. To create a work so captivating, he could nearly fold the artist himself, were it not for those subtle reminders of the process of creation. Indeed, this resco has captivated us for more than 500 years, even as the meaning of this crucial detail eluded us. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you, Suzanne, that was super interesting. I would now like to introduce our next speaker, Lucy Partman. Actually, I will welcome Rachel DeLew, her advisor at Princeton University, to introduce her. Hi, my name is Rachel DeLew. I'm a professor in the Art and Archaeology Department at Princeton University, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to my student, Lucy Partman. Lucy is in her sixth year of study here in the Department of Art and Archaeology. She came to Princeton from Yale, where she earned an undergraduate degree both in art history and in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Her work here at Princeton has focused on American art and visual culture, and she focuses in particular on the history of science, pedagogy, and performance. She's written about and published on topics as diverse as the art of Norman Lewis, the representation of Civil War bodies in 19th century art and science, the portraits of John Singer Sargent, and the relationship between the genre of portraiture and the practice of taxidermy. In addition to her studies at Princeton, Lucy has worked on research and curatorial projects at several museums, including the Yale Center for British Art and the Jewish Museum in New York City. She's also undertaken a number of collaborations at the Princeton University Art Museum, including assisting with the work in preparation for the important recent exhibition, Nature's Nation, American Art and Environment. While at Princeton, Lucy has been deeply engaged with efforts to support teaching and professional development for graduate students. She serves, among other things, as a long-term graduate teaching fellow at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, and she is also a senior university administrative fellow in the office of the dean of the graduate school here at Princeton. Lucy's dissertation, from which she draws the material she'll present in her talk today, her dissertation focuses on the fascinating life and work of the 19th century American artist, doctor and educator, William Rimmer. Her talk today is entitled, Surface of Thought, William Rimmer's Blackboard. I am happy to welcome Lucy to the proverbial podium. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Rachel, for that introduction and thank you to the whole Barnes team. Let's get going. When you hear the word Blackboard, what comes to mind? I think in this day and age, we may be most likely to think of the learning management system known as Blackboard. The term Blackboard has become so synonymous with education that it is easy to forget about the object it refers to. A large, smooth, dark surface, ready to be covered with white markings and for chalk dust to cling to the surrounding air. In the early 19th century, the Blackboard was actually a novel and lauded piece of technology and it quickly became a central tool in classrooms throughout the United States. For centuries before, students had relied on their individual boards or sleights in the classroom. The development and use of one large board meant that everyone could see and focus on the same thing at the same time. As a result, students were oriented out and away from themselves. But why all this talk about the Blackboard? 19th century American artist, educator and physician, William Rimmer, was well known during his lifetime for his teaching and specifically the drawings he made on the Blackboard. A period account claims, quote, if the drawings of entire figures and compositions of figures that Dr. Rimmer drew on the Blackboard at the Cooper Institute could have been preserved as they ought to have been, they would have made an invaluable and wonderful contribution to American art. If someone knows anything about Rimmer, it is usually his sculpture, The Fallen Gladiator, his painting, Flight and Pursuit, or the story that his father believed himself to be the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. These touchpoints, especially the fabulous family legend, have been the focus of scholarship since the artist's death. However, the period documents, including many newspaper articles, student accounts and Rimmer's own writing, tell other stories. They signal to me that we have to look closely at his teaching practice. Beginning in Boston in the 1860s, Rimmer lectured on what he called art anatomy throughout the Northeast. He conveyed the structural and physiological elements of the human body and that of other species, all while referencing art, literature and history. At the time, artists in specific and the public in general had little access to courses focused on the body. Artists John LaFarge and Ellen DeHale were among Rimmer's students, while many others, including Frederick Edwin Church, attended his lectures. Aside from artists, people of different ages, classes and occupations, all found themselves in Rimmer's classes and lectures. My dissertation proposes that Rimmer's art and teaching were intimately intertwined. His unique use of the Blackboard is one of the core components I investigate in the project and is what I will focus on in this brief talk. For Rimmer, we are fortunate to have a lot of extant material to help us reconstruct his fleeting Blackboard creations and the experience of being in his classroom. One of Rimmer's students was none other than Daniel Chester French, who became one of the most prominent American sculptors of the period. As a teenager in the early 1870s, he began studying with Rimmer in Boston. To teach, Rimmer used many tools, including his own sculptures, such as the Fallen Gladiator, as well as a copy of Jean-Antoine Udon's Blade Man, a skeleton, as well as colored charts. These all visualized different layers of the body and served as references from which to work. Amidst this, the Blackboard was a space to bring different elements and ideas together for everyone to see. French was so enthusiastic about Rimmer's Blackboard used, he got one for himself to practice with at home. French's sketchbooks evidence what was so unique about the way he learned while in Rimmer's class. For example, at the bottom of one page is a small drawing of a cherub, walking or running with a cloud at its feet. But that's not all. To the right, there is a skeletal rendering of the lower body of a child in the same position as the cherub. To the left is a list of characteristics as well as a comparison of a child and an adult body. Perhaps Rimmer had started on the board by speaking or writing the list of characteristics, then drew the cherub and then the skeletal version. No matter the order, what he generated was a constellation of ideas and connections. Rimmer didn't just teach the anatomy of the child, we also get a sense of how and why as well as what if. What if you compared the child to an adult? What if you wanted to depict a child flying? This was not a fixed system for students to just copy. Rimmer in fact, strongly opposed, was strongly opposed to students learning through copying. Copying along with memorization and recitation were central to pedagogy during the period and fit the popular understanding of education as a passive process. In this context, the Blackboard served as a device, primarily for recording and reflecting information and monitoring students. In contrast, Rimmer's use of the Blackboard suggests a much more active pedagogical approach. For many years, people worried about the loss of the incredible drawings Rimmer produced while teaching. A fellow Bostonian provided the funding for a project that would, quote, secure a permanent expression of the knowledge which Dr. Rimmer had for so many years displayed upon the lecture platform, end quote. In one book entitled Art Anatomy, Rimmer brought together an extraordinary network of disciplines, including ethnology, anatomy, art, physiology, physiognomy, and more. He worked at his typical breakneck speed over the summer of 1876 to produce its nearly 900 drawings. This monumental publication is another key resource to help reconstitute his Blackboard work. Taking a bird's eye view of the pages, we find that they are not hierarchical or tabulated. Each page is loaded with information and covered with Rimmer's own handwriting. It can be hard to follow and determine the order of images and how to best approach them. On the second page, for example, we have to move up and down and across the page to follow the numbered heads. In the classroom, students similarly would have had to work to follow Rimmer as he moved around the Blackboard. Rather than look at images and text in separate defined boxes, readers have to view them in concert. It's as if the text were interjections of speech. The text provide descriptions, but Rimmer also includes directives to compare and to notice specific details. And he asked the reader questions. Accompanying a drawing of a head with two faces on the second page, Rimmer asks, quote, what is the form of the head seen from above, below, from the side? What parts come into view as the head is placed in different positions, end quote. There are example of these different positions all over the page for the reader to engage with and to question. Art anatomy does not allow the viewer to get comfortable with any one way of looking or thinking. The reader has to constantly engage, move around the page and actively follow the material. Each page in Art Anatomy is like a snapshot of a Blackboard covered with different parts of a lesson Rimmer has just finished and is about to erase. Rimmer did not just use the board to depict body parts. He filled the Blackboard with richly detailed compositions. His students were awestruck by what he managed to rapidly create as he spoke. Such compositions could bring together the many facets of his lessons, such as an understanding of body parts, expression and costume. If the pages of Art Anatomy are any indication of what Rimmer produced on the board, perhaps the full page composition he included is the closest visual to what one of his Blackboard compositions looked like. In this piece, there are landscape elements, over seven figures in different positions, helmets and shields. Let's think about this as if it were a snapshot of a Blackboard right before Rimmer erased it. Perhaps he began with the two central nude figures. One to the left is seen from the back and the other is seated with a visible torso. We can imagine that from a lesson on the muscles of the back and torso, Rimmer could then build out this whole composition. Student accounts note how quickly Rimmer worked on the board, drawing and explaining one remarkable composition after the next. The rapid pace at which he drew must have pushed his students to work quickly as well. My sense is that this prevented students from copying. Instead, they had to actively figure out what to focus on and take note of and what parts to select, connect and visualize for themselves. As a space for his students to think, question and experiment rather than passively record or copy, Rimmer's Blackboard was to quote a 20th century educator's phrase, a surface of thought. But I don't think it operated in this manner just for his students. The Blackboard was likely a surface of thought for Rimmer as well. Period accounts note that he worked at the board in such a way that seemed unconscious and automatic. It is understandable that much of what Rimmer taught became second nature. He did many lectures over nearly 20 years. What might have appeared to his audience as sudden bursts of inspiration was also likely the product of working through material over an extended period of time. The Blackboard I am suggesting was a space for Rimmer to develop compositions and ideas. In this way, we can view his Blackboard work as part of his artistic practice. If not exactly preparatory, then a form of visual thinking. In most of the literature on Rimmer, scholars have noted his lack of preparatory work. This fits very well into the narrative of an artist as a visionary who directly transmitted and visualize what was in his head into art. Rimmer's biographer Truman Bartlett suggests that he was impatient and did not want to create any formal prep studies. This does not however mean that he did not work through and develop ideas over time. Bartlett in fact relays that Rimmer was always drawing and working wherever and whenever he could. Rimmer may not have made many or any preparatory studies in a traditional sense, but it appears he developed ideas across surfaces. One of his students recalled that the nine days they fell, a theme from John Milton's Paradise Lost was one of the many multi-figure groups he drew on the board. In one of Rimmer's extant sketchbooks, I found a drawing of the same title. We can view this sketch as an iteration of an evolving theme Rimmer developed in different media over time. In the same sketchbook, we find a pair of lions fighting one another in a position very much like those in his sculpture Fighting Lions. I imagine Rimmer drew versions of this on the board to teach with as well. However detailed and extraordinary Rimmer's Blackboard drawings were, they were also temporary and fleeting. Perhaps because the Blackboard was just another space for Rimmer to test things out and think through ideas as he taught, he was not so worried about erasing the masterful drawings he produced. To look closely at Rimmer's teaching practice opens up new interpretive lenses through which we can experience his art. What, for example, might it mean for a painting to operate as a surface of thought? Let's return to Rimmer's Flight and Pursuit from 1872. Numerous scholars have offered interpretations of the painting relating it to Rimmer's family, biblical stories, Lincoln's assassination, and the specter of slavery among many others. However, none of these account for his approach to teaching and the philosophy of art he relayed to his students. Rimmer emphasized the importance of engaging the viewer through art and leaving space for the viewer's own imagination, experiences and questions. Flight and Pursuit presents us with so much detail and many realistic elements, it seems we should be able to situate ourselves easily. At the same time, it feels so unrealistic, fragmented, and as if it were a dream world. It's destabilizing. We're on one foot like the man in flight running around in motion trying to figure it out. The painting seems to ask us questions such as what are you running from? What are you looking for? Where and in what do you seek refuge? The painting brings you in only to orient you out to investigate not the artist, but your own psychological state. It's a painting more about questions and questioning than a singular answer or interpretation. It is a surface of thought, not so unlike Rimmer's Blackboard. Its surface reveals a compendium of lessons on how to depict architecture, the figure in motion, light and shadow and more. Even the quasi-nearer figures represent a kind of compare and contrast lesson. Rimmer's art, like his teaching, unsettles, destabilizes, guides and awakens. In many respects, his art teaches. To embrace art's capacity to teach and recognize its value as a tool for learning and questioning, as I believe Rimmer did, renders art not something adjunct or adjacent, but very much essential to life. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lucy. That was so thought-provoking and original. Our next speaker is Navastrida, and I am pleased to welcome her and her advisor, Dr. Alicia Walker from Bryn Mawr to introduce her. Here's Alicia Walker, and I am an associate professor in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where I teach medieval art and architecture. Today, I am very pleased to introduce my doctoral student, Navastrida. Navastrida graduated summa cum laude from the Macaulay Honors Program at Queens College, and before joining the doctoral program at Bryn Mawr, she completed an MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. Navastrida is a manuscript specialist, and during her graduate studies at Bryn Mawr, she has gained extensive training in medieval book studies through fellowships with the renowned Rare Book School and the Oxford University Program in Greek Paleography, as well as training in Kodakology and Curatorship at Yale University's Beinecke Library and the University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Center. During a curatorial fellowship in rare books at Bryn Mawr, Navastrida developed an innovative digital exhibition of a 15th century French devotional manuscript, which won the 2016 Digital Scholarship Award from the Delaware Valley Medieval Association. Most recently, Navastrida has held a year-long graduate curatorial internship in the manuscripts department of the Getty Museum. Navastrida's doctoral research focuses on middle Byzantine sacred manuscripts, and she is particularly interested in the iconography of body language. Through painstaking consideration of patterns and the representation of gesture and posture in medieval Byzantine books, she's arrived at innovative theories for how Byzantine artists communicated both the content of biblical and apocryphal narratives, as well as how gesture could function in an exegetical, that is to say, an interpretive mode. She proposes the body language inflected viewers understanding of events from sacred history and imparted theological knowledge to medieval devotees. Navastrida's training and research have been supported by the Medieval Academy of America, the International Center of Medieval Art, and the Dolores Zorav Liebman Foundation. She is currently completing her dissertation titled Schemata, The Language of the Body in Middle Byzantine Eliminated Manuscripts, and her paper today draws from that doctoral research. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you, Professor Walker, and thank you also to the Bargains Foundation and especially the symposium organizers who pulled this event together literally across the ether, also to my fellow presenters and to everyone tuning in for this talk. My paper today explores images of speech in the 12th century manuscript Vatican Grecus 746, which is one of six illustrated octetooks known from Byzantium. Octetooks are manuscripts containing the first eight books of the Hebrew Bible, that is genesis through root. The six illustrated volumes are probably the most famous group of manuscripts to survive from middle or late Byzantium. They're heavily illustrated. Together they contain over 1,500 images depicting a breadth of biblical subjects that is frankly unparalleled in Byzantine art. Here we're looking at an opening from Vatican Grecus 746, which is a particularly imposing book. It's now bound into enormous volumes, which hold a total of 508 folios, which is to say 1,016 pages, showing over 350 images. As we can see, the pages have a large central block of biblical text, which is surrounded by a border of biblical commentary, usually in a slightly smaller hand, and the images are scattered through the text. Incidentally, I picked this opening because it contains an example of some of the rare iconography that we see in this manuscript. At the upper left, we see Noah and his family building the ark, and then calling the animals to the ark, and among the animals we see that high symbol of rarity, a unicorn. Now, at first glance, pictures of body language in Vatican Grecus 746 might seem repetitive. In this slide, we see a more or less randomly chosen sampling of figures from the octetuk, who stand in versions of a pose that usually denotes devoted attention or listening. In middle Byzantine art, posture and gesture are generally expressed through schematic formulae that don't immediately seem to express character or emotion in organic ways. At first glance, these sorts of figures might even seem to signal a lack of artistic creativity. Perhaps for this reason, Byzantine images of body language have received very little critical attention, and art historians regularly describe different postures and gestures casually, without reference to their particular forms, sources or meanings. In contrast, I'm going to argue that images of body language in Vatican Grecus 746 are vividly meaningful. They just rely on a symbolic language that's foreign to most modern viewers. I propose that in order to understand this language, we need to study the manuscript's wide range of images closely and sensitively, looking at how the particular forms of gestures shift in relation to the stories they illustrate. When we look at speech gestures in this way, we see that the manuscript's illustrations contain rich information about how the Byzantines interpreted the Bible, and also about how they understood different types of communication. I'm focusing today on Vatican Grecus 746, mostly so that we can concentrate on a manageable number of images, but it's worth noting that actually five of the six known illustrated architects contain very similar image programs. These five pictures, which come from five different manuscripts, all illustrate the same story from the book of Joshua chapter two. Although the landscape and architecture change a little bit across the scenes, the basic compositions and the gestures are very similar. In my dissertation, I do apply today's ideas about speech gestures to all five manuscripts, and I deal with some of the complexities of artistic copying practices. I think we could probably apply my observations on speech gestures to a much broader corpus of middle Byzantine art. That is to say to other media and across several centuries of art production. Vatican Grecus 746 depicts a wide range of biblical narratives, but it returns obsessively to images of speech. It depicts speech entirely through a nuanced iconography of hand gestures, rather, for instance, than through open mouths or inscribed scrolls. These hand gestures form a varied, deliberate, visual vocabulary that I'm gonna argue illustrates the mode of the depicted speech and also the status of the speaker. I'm going to show that Vatican Grecus 746 contains two major classes of speech gesture. The first type, which we see here in the image on the left, I'm gonna call the open-handed speech gesture. It appears in scenes that show everyday human interactions. This is the manuscript's most neutral and ambiguous image of speech. It makes a useful counterpoint to the second type of speech gesture, which I'm calling the pointing speech gesture. The hand of God makes this type of gesture here when it descends from the vault of heaven to command people. The gestures characterized by a combination of extended and folded fingers. It recurs dozens of times across Vatican Grecus 746, not only in images of the hand of God, but also in scenes where other figures act as surrogates for the divine. Unlike the open-handed gesture, which denotes simply communication, the pointing speech gesture regularly carries an implication of divine intent or command. For example, holy figures frequently make this type of gesture in scenes where they communicate God's will to other people. I argue further that there's also a very small number of unexpected figures who make this second type of gesture in scenes where they claim authority and especially spiritual authority and where they exercise free will in unusual and sometimes transgressive circumstances. The gestures also used differently in representations of men and women, reflecting fundamental differences in how the Byzantines thought the genders assumed and expressed power. First I'll outline some of the resonances of the open-handed speech gesture. Excuse me. In this scene from the book of Genesis, chapter 27, the biblical foremother, Rebecca, advises her son, Jacob, to trick his father, Isaac, into giving him a blessing that's meant for his older twin. Seated near the doorway of her home, back straight head slightly inclined, Rebecca rests her left hand open on her knee and raises her right arm bent at the elbow, extending her open right hand, palm raised and turned inward. Jacob stands before her, he bends both elbows and raises both hands the right higher than the left. In the post that we saw a few slides ago suggests respectful, humble or prayerful listening. These next two images demonstrate some of the implications of the open-handed speech gesture. On top we see a scene from Genesis, chapter 42, where Jacob proceeded at the far right, sends his sons to find green in Egypt during a famine. And on the bottom we see an image from Exodus, chapter five, where the Israelites complain that Pharaoh, who you see seated on left, is torturing them with impossible labor. In these biblical narratives, Jacob, the Israelites and Pharaoh, who all make open-handed speech gestures in the illustrations, are all speaking on their own authority and they're not channeling divine wisdom. While the speeches of Jacob and the Israelites aren't condemned in the biblical narrative, they do have complicated resonances. Jacob's sons succeed in finding grain in Egypt and they're reunited with their long-lost brother Joseph, but their move to Egypt ultimately leads to the enslavement of the Israelites. The Israelites in the lower scene rightly beg Pharaoh for mercy, but he doesn't listen until God instructs Moses and Aaron to usher in the 10 plagues, which bring ruin on the Egyptians. The speech gestures in these scenes imply that the characters are speaking not with divine wisdom or authority. By contrast, the second class of speech gestures signals speech that has a profound connection to divine will. Here we see the hand of God enlivening Adam, which is an archetypal image of divine creative power. In the octet hooks, God almost always appears as a right hand extending down from the rounded vault of heaven. The hand of God appears many, many times across Vatican, Grecus 746, and it's nearly always making a version of this gesture in which the first finger is extended, the third is bent to meet the thumb in front of the palm, and then the second finger and the pinky sometimes are and sometimes aren't extended. The different versions of the gestures seem to be used largely interchangeably. Slightly different versions are used in the same scenes, even across the most closely related octet hooks. And so at least for the purposes of this paper, I'm going to discuss them as a single category. We see these pointing gestures regularly in representations of the hand of God, but they also appear frequently in images of people who follow and serve God. In these scenes, the gesture marks human speech that has a resonance of divine intent. Sometimes it's explicitly clear that the person making the gesture is communicating divine will. So for example, in this illustration, the hand of God issues directions down to Noah before the flood that destroys the world. And Noah using a very clear version of the same gesture transmits God's instructions immediately to his sons who stand to the right of the image. In other places, the connection to divine speech is only implicit. So for example, we see Moses and Aaron making pointing speech gestures as they bring on the plague of lice in Egypt. Even though the hand of God isn't in the plague scene, the gesture makes it clear that Moses and Aaron are enacting divine will. Some characters in the octetux can even earn the pointing speech gesture as they grow in the biblical narrative. Joshua appears several times in the illustrations of Vatican Grecus 746 between the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, but he only ever makes an open-handed speech gesture. Here, for instance, we see him greeting Moses with an open-handed gesture after Moses has descended from Sinai. However, once God appoints Joshua as Moses's successor and gives him command of the Israelite army, Joshua begins consistently to speak with the more powerful pointing gesture. This iconographic shift takes place very concretely in the two registers seen that we're looking at, which comes from the first chapter of the book of Joshua. In the upper register, the hand of God issues down from heaven to declare Joshua the new leader of the Israelites. And in the lower register, Joshua immediately exercises his new authority. Right hand raised in a powerful gesture of speech, he commands his officers to provision the people and prepare to cross into the land of Israel. From this moment on, the pointing gesture becomes a key and common feature of Joshua's gestural vocabulary. So far, I've spoken about images in which the pointing gesture very directly expresses divine will, but there's also a small number of illustrations in which the same gesture expresses a more subversive type of power. The hand of God we've seen usually appears from the side of the picture frame and extends down at an angle. But in this scene, which shows Noah and his sons making a sacrifice after the flood that almost destroys the whole world, the hand descends directly down from the center of the scene above the burnt offering that we see on the altar. On the very next folio, in an image of the drunkenness of Noah, we see another centralized and vertical speech gesture, but this time with major reversals of foreman meaning. After sacrificing to God, Noah immediately plants a vineyard and gets drunk. We see him drinking from a huge cup on the left and then there's grape threshing in the middle and he lies passed out drunk on the right. His two virtuous sons, Shem and Yaphad, who stand closest to him, avert their eyes and they cover their father with a cloak. However, Noah's third son, Kham, looks directly at his father and raises his right hand to the heavens. His unusual vertical gesture is a reverse image of God's gesture at the covenant after the flood. The biblical text doesn't explain exactly what Kham does wrong in this episode, but it's clear that he's committed some sort of a grave sin in some way deeply disrespecting his father. We know this because when Noah wakes, he harshly curses Kham's descendants and he blesses his other two sons. This is the scene of the blessing. The two virtuous sons raise their hands and what we now know is a pose of respectable listening and Kham had left steps away holding his hand to his face in a Byzantine gesture and that suggests grief or mourning. The text doesn't explain the nature of Kham's sin. It does say that he told his brothers that his father was drunk and naked, that his offense isn't usually tied to speech, so much as to some sort of vaguely defined sexual transgression, sometimes just to looking at his father naked. In this scene, however, the hand gesture serves to illustrate his character for the viewer. The formal subversion of God's speech gesture in an image of sin suggests that Kham's offense lies in arrogantly assuming a power that in this context rightly belongs to God or to his representatives. The brother class of pointing speech gestures is also highly gendered. Across the hundreds of images in Vatican Gracchus 746, only three female figures make these gestures and each in very few scenes. All of these women are willful in exceptional ways and they're each very distinctive. So first in this image, we see Eve making the pointing gesture in the scene where she speaks to the beautifully rendered serpent in Eden before eating from the tree of knowledge, which the Byzantines of course thought was a foundational human sin. We saw earlier that Rebecca makes an open-handed gesture when she advises her son, Jacob, to trick his father. However, in an adjacent scene, she actually confronts her husband herself and in this image she makes a pointing speech gesture. This is the only scene in which Rebecca makes this gesture and her action has complicated resonances. On the one hand, she's tricking her husband, which to the Byzantines would have been a very bad thing. On the other hand, she moves sacred history forward by helping Jacob to assume his birthright and to escape his father's home unscathed. The final female figure to make a pointing speech gesture is much less famous. After succeeding Moses, Joshua has to bring the Jews into the land of Israel. He sends two spies to do reconnaissance in the city of Jericho, which he intends to attack. The spies meet a Canaanite prostitute named Rahav, pictured here, who almost immediately sympathizes with their cause. She hides them from the city guards and then she helps them escape back to Joshua. When they return to conquer the city, they spare her and her family and she converts to Judaism. In this scene, Rahav makes our familiar speech gesture as she greets two men who've been variously identified, either as the two Israelite spies or as two guards of Jericho. At first glance, we might think that problematic women make this gesture in Byzantine art. However, it's also the case, maybe surprisingly, that the prostitute Rahav is very valorized in Byzantine exegesis. Because of her repentance and her recognition of God, she is understood as a model of conversion and also sometimes even as a type for the church. Eve, Rebecca, and Rahav are all powerful women in the Christian tradition because they engage in behaviors that disrupt, be established or expected social order. Eve disobeys God's command and eats from the tree of knowledge. Rebecca fools her husband and Rahav, a prostitute, betrays her people in the cause of a greater truth. All three women, moreover, are also listed in the Gospel of Matthew as Ancestor of Christ. I propose that the use of the pointing speech gesture in these illustrations functions neither as condemnation nor as praise. Rather, it marks moments when figures exercise free will in momentous ways. The pointing speech gesture usually illustrates speech that's charged with divine intent, which is to say with an echo of the logos or divine reason, a concept that I address more fully in my dissertation. However, we see in these scenes that it sometimes resonates with the vitality of human choice, solidifying human speech into consequential physical action. Made of parchment and pigment, stiller and older than any living person, the images in Vatican Grecus 746 are alive with the sounds of many voices. Different iconographies of gesture articulate different registers of speech where open-handed gestures express the productive ambiguities of ordinary conversation, pointing gestures bespeak divine intent, allegiance with God and also extraordinarily willful disruptions of sacred and social order. Through its careful delineations of gesture, the manuscript invites us into a world charged with the pervasive hum of human and divine speech where word and act merge in a complex system of visible communication. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nava. And also Suzanne and Lucy, those were three really interesting papers. We're gonna talk about them now. I invite everybody watching to ask questions or make comments in the chat. And then we will, I will read them to our speakers. Also, I wanna encourage speakers to, if you have questions for each other, make sure that you get those questions in there and you can just sort of signal to me somehow that you have a question. So one of the things that I love about this symposium is that you get to hear talks that are outside of your own area. And I work in the 19th century. So I focus on 19th century France. So it was a lot of fun for me to hear these talks in areas that I'm not so familiar with. I wanna start with a question for Suzanne. As somebody who studies modern art when we talk about different media, we're talking art theory and after the 19th century becomes so much about the purity of the medium. And painting, doing what only painting can do and acknowledging the physical properties of its own medium. So it was very interesting to hear a talk where artists were deliberately trying to sort of slip between media. And I thought that your discussion of the way that Raphael is really kind of moving between sculpture and painting. Well, obviously he's bringing painting in because he's painting, but the way that he's referencing sculpture was very convincing. And then to bring in the Galatea theme and to introduce that and to think about Raphael as a kind of Pygmalion and introduces this other sort of dimension to that intermediality because you're going in between painting and sculpture but also real life because she's coming to life. And I found that to be just really interesting to think about. So my question is about the theme of fragmentation because you talk about the way that Raphael is deliberately kind of revealing parts of the composition to be references to sculpture. But he could have referenced the medium of sculpture without doing so in such a fragmented way. So I'm asked, so can you say more about why he's bringing all of these things together into this one composition? Yeah, I think, and I like to use the term slip or slippage between media. I think that is a great way to describe sort of what he's doing. The fragmentation I think was really important because at this time, artists were really fascinated by the actual fragmented pieces of ancient sculptures that they were finding all over Rome. And Leonard Barkin has done some really important work on how these fragments sort of played a role in stimulating the imagination to complete them. And so, there are certainly some other artists who were pointing to antique sculptures in other ways, even on the ceiling in the Villa Farnesina, Baldassari Peruzzi did this Allantica set of scenes where he was treating the sculptures in a different way and in a more kind of antiquarian way. And Raphael's really, I think, trying to point to the process of creation itself and restoring those fragments. So the fragmentary nature of the remnants was really important to that, to his creative process. Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna ask questions in the order in which you presented. So the next one is for Lucy. And I loved your talk as well. I think that it was very interesting to think about the way that that Rimmer's work and his teaching encourages a new way of looking, really demands it. An active, a more active role on the part of the viewer. I wanna talk about the blackboard as, well, my question is about the blackboard as a surface of thought for Rimmer, specifically in his own work. I kept thinking about sketchbooks the whole time that you were talking and you showed the sketchbook of Daniel, Chester French, but sketchbooks are a thought surface as well. Blackboards, as you say, are something that are different and that they are something that all students could see at once, which I thought was really interesting, but also something that it's also a medium that's only temporary, of course. So can you expound upon the difference between blackboard drawings and a regular old sketchbook for Rimmer's own work? Why is the blackboard as a medium important for his work? Yeah, thank you so much for that question. I think that's fantastic because I do focus quite a bit more on the blackboard's relevance for his students and the teaching, but I do think this kind of temporariness and what happens in a time-bound medium, the sketchbook you can save, it goes on, but there's something different about working on the scale of a blackboard with an audience. Later on in my dissertation, I talk about the performative nature of Rimmer's teaching and perhaps also his art. So I think that there is something about this, even the aesthetic or the constraints of the blackboard, they're both constraints and the opportunity of having an audience, having the scale, the size, the medium itself that maybe contributed to this thinking and to the iterating of compositions, maybe the fact that it was kind of one and done and then you do another one on another lecture, that is different. You don't look back at it like in a sketchbook. So I think that there is value in that and not just for his students, but for his own kind of thinking about art. Thank you, fantastic. And I think that what you said about the performative aspect seems also really something to think about too. That's super interesting. And Nava, I find it fascinating that so much can be communicated just through a hand and you were so convincing. I mean, I found myself just, I was sort of riveted by what you were saying and I especially liked the discussion of Ham in the drunkenness of Noah's scenes. My question for you is really more of a historiographic question. And it's simply, why has this not, why do you think that this has not been investigated before? Cause it's such a great, seems a very important topic. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think this ties into a couple of the questions that have showed up in the chat. There is, as far as I can tell, no real Byzantine literature on body language. You know, there's classical literature on body language. You can read Roman oratorical texts. They tell you what hand gestures to make. And then from the Renaissance onward, you get literature and comportment and even specific literature on hand gestures. And maybe that used to exist in Byzantium and it's lost, but it really doesn't seem to exist anymore. So I think scholars are following textual sources. And maybe sometimes there's also a temptation to make common sense assumptions about body language. Body language is incredibly historically specific, but it sometimes looks accessible in ways that it's not. You know, you sort of think, well, the person has their handout, you're greeting me, they're handing something to me. And you don't think maybe in the original context, this meant something a lot more specific, which you only see when you look at a really, really big corpus of images that's connected. So you can look across the scenes at how they make meaning. Beyond that, I just, you know, there's so much to study and there just aren't that many Byzantinists. And it just might not be a thing that's been taken up. A very practical answer. I'm going to, thank you. I'm gonna go to the chat now and I'm gonna skip around a little bit. So I'm not gonna be reading the questions in the order in which they came in necessarily. This one is from Rachel Deleu. Thank you to the speakers for their excellent talks. She says, I'd love to hear Lucy and Nava talk about a possible conceptual link between their talks, visual conjurings of the speaking and gesturing body, either literally through figuration, as with the Byzantine manuscript, or implicitly, as with the traces of Rimmer's gesturing body in his Blackboard drawings. So what are the things that underpins my research as the difference between what gesture means and how it functions in art and how it functions in real life? When Rimmer was making his figures, he was gesturing. But when you put a gesture in art, it becomes fixed. So there's an idea in social scientific literature that human performed gestures occupy a continuum ranging from the least to the most lexical. So, you know, marking beats in a conversation or illustrating like something that's really big or really small, all the way to stuff that has precise lexical meaning, like, you know, giving the finger. And in art, everything sort of has a, if not precise, relatively defined iconographic meaning. Everything is a symbol. Nothing is natural or illustrative in the way that it might be in real life. So I think maybe one difference is that mine is strictly looking at images of people and Lucy has a real person acting, you know, making the gestures, which you can't see in the manuscripts. What do you think? Yeah, I was thinking of your work mom and I was thinking about the speaking, you know, and people speaking perhaps in relationship to the manuscript itself. So the reading, there is maybe a performative element in the engagement with the book itself. So that, I mean, that's different because again, it's in the manuscript, it's stories and their gestures being captured. But there, I kept thinking about the relationship to that book, how it comes a lot alive, you know, through the maybe speaking of the story and in engaging with the images and the gestures, do others also kind of perform them or do you take them on, you know, as a directive, almost like a stage direction? And so, I mean, I don't know how literal this is, but famously Byzantine reading was often done out loud. So the people reading this book, maybe not specifically this book, we have very little information on how it was used, would have spoken and maybe they'd have made some of the gestures in the manuscript. So there would have been a lost transient in the way that a Blackboard image can be iteration of the gestural vocabulary that you see in the book. Great, thank you for that question, Rachel. I'm gonna now, this is a question for Suzanne from Kalyn Jewel and I will take a moment to say, thank you, Kalyn. And Kalyn finished her PhD at Temple a couple years ago and spoke at this symposium and is now, she now works at the Barnes as a senior instructor in our adult education program. Kalyn says, to Suzanne, thank you for a fascinating talk. I would love to hear your thoughts on how the Renaissance restoration of ancient sculptures had an impact on a painting program like those at the Farnesina. Thank you, Kalyn. That's a great question, I think is kind of similar to what you were asking earlier, Martha. And the, I think it was absolutely essential. Antiquity and broadly speaking was essential to these kinds of painting programs. And in this villa for Agassino Keegee, who was not a nobleman by birth, recreating a villa that was based on ideas from antiquity that sought to recreate a villa from antiquity in order to enable himself, encapsulated this idea totally. And so, and he was collecting ancient sculptures himself and would have had these pieces in fragments kind of around his property that would have been inspiration for these artists as well. So the different ways that they were restoring sculptures within the works was really essential to conveying this sort of sense of antiquity to establishing the credibility of this building and of Keegee as sort of within the lineage of the noble lineage of ancient Rome. And the role of fantasy of imagination was absolutely crucial in taking those sculptures and giving them new life, restoring them in different styles. I mentioned the ceiling of Peruzzi that was done in sort of an antiquarian way. And Raphael was trying to create a kind of a new, more modern art but based still on these remnants and that creative process that he's showcasing there. And the role of fantasy is what Fazzari said separated the third era from the ones that came before. So I think that was really crucial and we see this playing out in paintings later on in the century too and Raphael's other works in the Vatican and in Manera art later in the century as well. Thank you. Tessa Haas asks Nava for, she says, thank you so much to all the speakers. Nava, what were the social implications of these gestures in their time? Who was privy to these manuscripts and how were these gestures understood? She also says, I apologize if this is unanswerable as you know, we work across different temporal moments. We do, and it's a great question. It's partly unanswerable just because we don't have really clear literature on when people use specific gestures. The sort of literature that you actually do have for like Roman orators. We do know that the books almost certainly had an imperial connection. There's three of the octatooks that are very closely related. The same scribes and illuminators seem to have worked in different combinations on them and one of them is associated with the Byzantine royal families. So the books probably were situated really at the center of empire. It's entirely possible that the people that used them and read them engaged in this vocabulary of gesture. But I wouldn't necessarily take the gestures as a too literal reflection of everyday life. The Byzantines were really deeply invested in an ideal of bodily control. Being in perfect control of how you present yourself in the world. And I think the images that we see in the manuscript take that ideal to a higher level than would be easy to actualize as a living human. I think people probably spoke with many more than two major classes of gestures. They probably illustrated their speech and marked beats in their speech. So I can't answer very clearly whether the gestures would have been used in everyday life. But I can say that this is a book that the most powerful people in Byzantium probably would have known about, interacted with, maybe owned. If that helps. Joseph Copta was also asking something sort of along these lines. So maybe you answered him. Do you think these speech gestures in the manuscript are replicating performative gestures in actual Byzantine speech? So here's, okay, go ahead. You know, I'll be completely blunt. I'm sort of guessing here because unfortunately there are no more Byzantines and there are no clear texts explaining how they illustrated their speech with gesture. But I think it's entirely possible, for instance, that the powerful speech gesture was used in everyday life or even as a blessing gesture and religious ritual. It's pervasive in Byzantine religious art. If you think about the sort of most famous powerful images of Christ, the Christ the Antichotter images, he's making a version of this gesture. I'd be really surprised if it didn't happen in active counterpart. But I can't say a hundred percent, but that's true. And I want to read this comment from Lisa Saltman. That's also for Nova. She says, there is a hideous irony in the fact that a complex hand gesture, once a sign of the divine finds its legacy, not or not only in ASL, but in the signaling of white supremacists. Question, what does that third finger to thumb signify? Does it echo a character, be it Greek or Hebrew? Is there a numerological significance? So thank you, Professor Saltman. It's a great question. It's a gesture that resonates in many different forms through history, a version of it. You can see in the Mano Cremuto, which is either a superstitious or something adjacent to a cursed gesture in South Italy. It's very like the gesture Spider-Man makes in the Spider-Man movies. Texas Longhorns fans will recognize it from sporting events. One interesting thing about gesture, this sort of lexical gesture is very culturally specific, but it gets translated into many different contexts with many different meanings. I actually did not know that this was a gesture associated with white supremacy and I find that a little bit distressing because I intend to present this paper in different forms. The significance of the specific fingers, I can't answer concretely. I can say one very fun interpretation that I read is that the placement of the fingers is ideally supposed to represent the name of Christ. So you have an I and a C kind of, and then an X, you can't see my hand, and then an I. So, you know, Jesus Christi. But that really doesn't hold up in how the gestures represented at least in Byzantine manuscripts of this time may be most interesting as a suggestion of how people want to read gesture as a form of really verbal speech. Beyond that, I haven't seen anything suggesting a specific implication for the finger placement. Okay, thank you. Before we wrap up, I just want to make sure that you don't have any, do you have any questions for each other? Comments or you don't have to. I wanted to give you the opportunity. Thank you for three really, truly excellent papers. Thank you to everybody for tuning in to session two and for your good questions and comments.