 Hi and welcome to today's takeout. My name is Amy Gillette, I'm a collections researcher at the Barnes. Now today we're going to go into gallery number four and if you watched last week we actually looked at this medievalizing image by the American artist Charles Prendergast entitled The Offering. And today we're going to look at an actually medieval image above it, a little image of the Madonna and child made in the Upper Rhine or Southwest region of Germany right around in the late 1400s. So let's step on in and take a closer look. Here we are and it's an absolutely exquisite image and maybe my favorite in the entire collection and it's hard to see when you're physically in the gallery so I'm so glad to be able to look at it in depth with you today. So like we said it's the Madonna or Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ in this paradise like garden. And the central composition itself with this very gentle young mother, this sweet little infant is something that our artist who is anonymous would have copied from really famous artists. There are compositions by artists such as Roger van der Vijden in the earlier 1400s and then the famous painter and printmaker Martin Schoengaard, who diffused these compositions all over northwestern Europe. And we see here, let's look a little closer. This little infant Christ. It's got white eyes, kind of chubby little cheeks. He's completely undressed to show his state of innocence of purity of grace. He has this cruciform halo made with real gold leaf and by cruciform I mean that it's got this cross that you might be able to see behind it only members of the Trinity would have and so that's Christ himself God the Father and also the Holy Spirit. And he seems to be receiving a golden apple from his mother right here and the apple itself is kind of abraded but it was a popular design to show that where mankind had fallen in a garden really because of an apple Christ would come back to redeem that sin. And on the other hand you can see, I think this is very sweet is gripping the side of his mother's mantle, but I want to look at his hands and feet for a sec which are in kind of contrived positions and that's that would be something that the person who would have been commissioning using this image would have understood as a reference to this baby's ultimate sacrifice as an adult on the cross and be able to imagine those little baby hands and feet ultimately being pierced through with nails which would have a huge poignant emotional impact. And then we're looking at the Virgin Mary sweet tender expression of a human mother down at her little boy. And you can see that she's wearing this blue mantle, which was a celestial color symbolizing sister symbolizing heaven. Let's take a look at this completely gorgeous mantle, red and gold and it's got pearls, the fix to it. Red showed that she was contributing through human blood human flesh to Christ. And likewise straddling the earthly and heavenly. We have this dual diadem so as much as she's a human mother to this little boy, we also get to see that ultimately she's going to rule alongside Christ is as the Queen of Heaven for this like extraordinary reward for extraordinary contribution to human salvation. And so, looking at these details, some of you might be wondering what on earth is going on with these flames behind the tree line and it's a major signal I think that this is no like natural garden landscape that we're looking at, but instead something on fire and it's the detail that it struck me. When I when I started looking at this picture and I remember going to look in the object file and to see if there's anything about it and all there was was a note saying that the trees appear to be on fire. So what I think is going on here is that in the Middle Ages, it was popular to look at the Virgin Mary as a kind of answer to the or a fulfillment of the burning bush that the prophet Moses had encountered in the desert in the Old Testament where he encountered a bush on fire that but not consumed because it was filled with God and medieval Christians believed that to be kind of a symbol of the Virgin Mary who was pregnant with Christ but still a virgin and not consumed. Other things that we can see around this victory, for example. A wonderful example I think of medieval botanical illustration, but part of what it would really signal would be that Ave Maria prayer, the Hail Mary prayer, Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with you, and then one of the lines is blessed is the fruit of your womb, a quotation from from the gospel of Luke. And then above that even we can see this wonderful son that seems to be inscribed with a crescent moon. That's a reference to the biblical book of Revelation where the event john the evangelist talks about. I'm going to read a quote, an apocalyptic woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet who brought forth a man child who was to rule all nations. Again understood to be the Virgin Mary. And then up here I think we may have the tree of life that also turned into the cross on which Christ was crucified and one of the details that I think is really quite amazing. If we look down here we've got, well, let's see not just a sec for for better context we've got this meandering stream going all throughout which could be a river of paradise it could be likewise the living water of baptism which Christians understood as requisite entering the kingdom of heaven. And if we look down in the corner though. Let's check this out. I see pearls, I see coral, some mollusks, and these as I understand are not things that you're going to be finding in a freshwater stream right and so these two are symbols or emblems coral for protection. The pearls were supposed to be Christ in the in the womb of Mary strawberries could stand for righteousness and like violets for humility and carnations for love but I think most importantly we can see here are some lilies here are some roses. You would see as these signs of the Virgin Mary's purity and she was also said to be a rose without thorns like consummately sweet, but the lilies and roses together were symbols of mystical union with the divine. A kind of interpretation of the lilies and roses that show up in the song of songs between a lover and his beloved. And that's what this entire image was really for was mystical union. If you were a member of the faithful using this image and maybe your home or a little chapel for private prayer you've got a candle flickering against all this gold and animating it on the halos on the brocade. You'd have all of these signs and symbols to incite these prayers, and the image was really a way of immersing yourself of decorating your own mind and own heart with these imageries to come together spiritually with Christ and Mary in hope of eventually joining them in in in the heavenly garden of paradise. And so this idea, an idea that I'd like to close with actually is that of repetition. I mentioned that the central composition as well as the garden idea were replicated time and again in in the late medieval world. Prayer itself was iterative, but the incidents were not isolated so much as understood as progressive every time say for instance you're saying to hail Mary it gets you a bit closer to paradise. And I'd like to think about that too in terms of where we see this within the Barnes Foundation, where the medieval image is above a kind of repetition of this medievalizing 20th century American image and likewise. Every time a visitor comes into these galleries we encounter these images of fresh something new. And so I think that every time we see them we engage with them. Perhaps we bring something new to ourselves as as well as to these paintings in their long lives and after lives. So that's it for today's take out and thank you so much for joining. 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