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Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's mango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I run things in this particular neck of the Art History Woods. First and foremost, thank you so much for wandering into this episode of the podcast. I am very happy to be in your ear today. Now I know I haven't posted in a long time, but I was away seeing stuff and things in very fun places. But I'm back now and I will be attempting to put out an episode every two to three weeks for the foreseeable future. So keep an eye out on your podcast feed and do feel free to yell at me if too much time goes by without an episode being posted. You have my explicit permission to do so. Before jumping into the episode this week, I want to say a quick but sincere thank you to everyone who has reached out to me through the podcast email or website to tell me that you like the show. The fact that you would take the time out of your day to do that means the world to me. So thank you so much. Just thank you. I really appreciate it. For this episode, episode six, I will be discussing the coolest thing that I saw over the course of my summer travels, which are the catacombs of San Gaudioso, an underground burial complex located in Naples, Italy, that's history spans over 1,500 years. So we've got plenty to talk about. I basically, almost literally, stumbled upon the catacombs of San Gaudrioso while I was in Naples. I spent a week in the city and I had seen lots of advertisements for catacomb tours, but I had a lot of stuff to do, and I just figured that I didn't have time to go splinking in the city. But on my last day in Naples, I was milling about one of the last churches that I had to see, minding my own business, you know, trying not to make eye contact, hoping that no one would talk to me, you know, the regular. And then all of a sudden, this very official looking guy was asking me questions in Italian, and then I started to panic, even though I know Italian, but I dislike unexpected human interaction due to my long-standing love affair with anxiety. But then I realized that this guy was asking me if I wanted to go on a tour of the catacombs located beneath the church, and I was like, hell yeah, I do. And it turned out to be one of the highlights of my travels. Now there isn't a ton of source material available on the catacombs of San Gaudioso. I am primarily drawing upon what I learned from the tour that I took of the catacombs, as well as the website of the Catacombari Napoli, which is the organization that maintains the catacombs of Naples and is in charge of running those tours. I usually would never choose to do an episode on a topic that has such limited source material, especially because I am a huge proponent of using multiple sources to write these episodes. But ultimately, the catacombs haven't been available to the public for very long, so there's very little scholarly material written about them. And I'm just, I'm so excited about this site that I'm just going to throw caution to Zavind and do the episode anyway. Part of that is because the catacombs are so damn cool, but the other part has to do with the efforts of the organization that takes care of them, which I will talk about more later in the episode. As I said, the catacombs of San Gaudioso are located in Naples, Italy, which is the city that everyone seems to love to hate. Take it from me, if you are going to Naples, do yourself a favour, a favor, a favour, and do not look at the TripAdvisor message boards about the city. You will convince yourself that, best case scenario, you'll get stabbed, your purse will get stolen, and you'll be left to drown in a sea of garbage. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the week that I spent in the city. Yes, plenty of people want to snatch your purse, but if you practice common sense, the only thing that you'll have to worry about is dodging scooters, buses, and cars because oh my god, those people are insane drivers. The rest of the time you can enjoy the city's many churches, museums, pizza parlors, and gelato joints. And of course, you can venture down into the subterranean world of the Neapolitan catacombs. As my dad would say, they are one of the places you might be dying to get into. Within Naples, which is a pretty big, the catacombs of San Gaudioso are located in the Rione Sanita, or the Sanita neighborhood, which is located at the base of the Capodimonte area of the city. In the Rione Sanita, the catacombs are located directly underneath the main church in that area, which is the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanita, or the Basilica of Saint Mary of Good Health. Locals, however, know the church as the Basilica of San Vincenzo. Why, you ask? Well, let me drop some local legend on you. Locals know the church as San Vincenzo after Saint Vincenzo Ferrer, who was an Italian saint from the 14th century. The church contains a wooden cult statue of San Vincenzo that is said to have performed over 80 miracles. 8080 Otto Zero. The greatest of these miracles happened in the mid-19th century, when the statue was processed through the streets of the neighborhood during a cholera epidemic, and it done, rat, cured eruan. Nothing to make you feel unproductive, like learning a hunk of wood cured an entire neighborhood of cholera in a single day, and all you managed to do today was eat saltwater taffy before 9 a.m. Good job, Lynns. Keep it up, keep it up. The catacombs themselves were built way, way earlier than the construction of the current church and the miraculous cure of cholera by San Vincenzo's hunk of wood. In fact, the catacombs were begun around the 5th century, which is about a hundred years after Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, which is to say that Christians could no longer be sold as lion kibble, at least not legally within the Roman Empire. During the 5th century, this area of Naples was not a part of the city, but rather it was a plot of land outside the city that was likely used to source tufa, which is a soft volcanic rock on which, and sometimes of which the city is built. The Romans then repurposed the Tufa mine into a burial site. This move was in accordance with Roman custom, which dictated that no bodies could be buried within the confines of the city due to sanitary concerns, which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense. During the 5th century, the catacomb was open to all Christians, so if you were a Christian, you could hypothetically be buried there. This would not be the case later on, as we will see, so keep that little nugget in mind. But over the years, the catacombs expanded until they essentially became a necropolis, a city of the dead. In the 5th or 6th century, there was also a basilica on this site, which was dedicated to the Madonna, Jesus' mother. Today there are very few indications of this earlier basilica, but the ones that are left are very important. The most important is a fresco of the Madonna and Child that you can still see today in a subterranean chapel beneath the main altar area of the current church. Art historians and archaeologists believe that this fresco is not only the oldest depiction of the Madonna and Child in Naples, but the oldest depiction in the entire region of Campania. For anyone who is familiar with Italy, you know that images of the Madonna and Child are absolutely friggin' everywhere. So this is no small bragging right to claim the oldest image in the city of this subject. I will post a picture of this fresco on the podcast's website, but for now just keep it in mind because it'll come up again in a little bit. As a visitor today, you enter the catacombs through a stairwell located near the main altar of the current church. The catacombs themselves are essentially a man-made cave comprised of passageways and rooms that form a web beneath this church. I have yet to see a map of the catacombs, but I am certain that you could get yourself good and lost down there, which is why tour guides must accompany all visitors at all times. As I talk, imagine yourself in a subterranean web of rooms and passageways. Better yet, go to the podcast's website, Stuff About Things, Podcast.com, to see pictures of all the things that I'm talking about, including the church, the catacombs, and other sites that I mention. The catacombs of San Gaudioso got their name around 452, when the body of San Gaudioso, or in English, Saint Gaudiosus, was buried there. San Gaudioso, as I will call him, was a bishop from Northern Africa who was forced into exile after a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals invaded his land. San Gaudioso and his Christian buddies refused to convert to whatever religion the Vandals practiced. So, like, would that be Vandalism? Maybe? I don't know. So the Vandals put him and the other Christians on a boat without oars, and they put it in the ocean and they gave it a little push. Long story short, San Gaudioso wound up in Naples after said boat got shipwrecked. He lived and worked and did good deeds in the city until his death, when his remains were then buried in the catacombs, which then took his name. One of the first stops on your tour of the catacombs is the grave of San Gaudiozo. You can even still see remnants of mosaic decoration that cover the arch above the grave, including an inscription that marks the grave as belonging to Gaudioso, though the rest of the mosaic is more or less gone. San Gaudioso's burial within the catacombs is incredibly important, as the presence of the popular saint's relics or bones attracted pilgrims and worshippers to the site. As it generally goes, the more popular a place is for worship, the more jazzed up people tend to make it in terms of decoration, or, as we in art history like to call it, art. At the Catacombs of San Gaudioso, the decorations of choice are mosaics and frescoes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these art forms, mosaics are created by taking small colored tiles called tesserae and arranging them to make a picture. Fresco, on the other hand, is a type of painting in which the artist paints directly onto wet plaster. When the plaster dries, it chemically binds with the pigment in the paint, and if done correctly, creates an extremely long-lasting painting that is effectively one with the wall. If not done correctly, you get something like Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, which is just a very unfortunate hot mess. In the catacombs, most of the walls are chalk full of frescoes. As you walk through the site, you need to be very careful not to touch the walls because of those frescoes, as the oil from human fingers messes with the stuff. But many of the frescoes are already unintelligible or just completely lost due to the humidity within the catacombs, which causes the plaster to flake off of the wall, taking the paint with it. I was pretty impressed though by how many of the frescoes not only survive but remain in pretty good condition. I mean they are 1500 years old, and that's pretty damn impressive. Because the catacombs are a place of burial, the subject matter of the frescoes reflects the function of the space. For example, there are a lot of paintings of fish on the walls of the catacomb. Now most people would assume that fish in a Christian context is related to the biblical story in which Jesus performs the miracle of multiplying fish at a wedding feast. Because, you know, that's the thing that people want at weddings, more fish. But the depiction of the fish is most likely a reference to Christians being seen as quote unquote fish taken into the net of Christianity by Jesus and his apostles, which to me, you know, sounds not so voluntary, but if people want to be metaphorical fish, let them be metaphorical fish. In the catacombs, there are also a lot of references to lambs, both in terms of Jesus being seen as a sacrificial lamb, but also because, like the fish thing, Christians were seen as lambs in the flock of Christ. Which to me, you know, sounds a little less Stockholm syndrome than the fish thing, so I can be on board with that one. And then there are a lot of my favorite Christian symbol, grapes on the vine. Again, you get a similar metaphor to the fish and the lambs, in that there is one parable in the Bible in which Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a vineyard, or something. There's also some point in the Bible where Jesus compares himself to the vine, meaning that his Christian dudes are all the grapes. Of course, you also have the claim that Jesus makes at the Last Supper that his blood will become wine for the salvation of all, which is still very much a part of the Christian ritual of communion. The primary importance of the early frescoes is that they allude to death and the Christian belief in resurrection, the idea that the soul will awaken in eternal life to live with Jesus. It's something that Christians still very much believe in. In addition to symbols like the fish, the lamb, and the grapes, you will also sometimes see names painted on the walls over the graves, or sometimes even images of the deceased, such as one fresco known as the fresco of Pasentius. This fresco depicts Saint Peter, introducing a man who is labeled Pascentius to a third figure. Now this man labeled Pascentius is likely a depiction of the deceased, and the third figure is probably Christ. It's a little bit hard to tell as the faces are entirely flaked off of the wall, and there aren't any symbols to confirm the third figure as Christ, but based on similar compositions in other places, it's safe to assume that the image probably depicts Saint Peter acting as a mediator between the soul of the deceased man, Pacentius, and Christ. The painting thus acts as a visual representation of the soul's journey in reaching salvation. Now this reminds me a lot of the images and scenes that you see in Egyptian tombs from the time of the pharaohs, and it speaks to this long-standing desire of humans to believe that our souls not only continue to exist after our death, but that we believe in guides like saints or gods who usher us into the afterlife. The catacombs were an active burial and worship site from their conception in the 5th century until the late Middle Ages, though it's unclear whether or not the site served as an active burial place that whole time, or if it was just a site of worship and reverence. Regardless, in the late Middle Ages the catacombs were abandoned. There are a couple of reasons for this abandonment. One is that there was a series of mudslides in the area that blocked or destroyed parts of the catacombs, or made them structurally unsafe. There were also some douchebags who stole the relics of St. Jenarius, who was another saint buried in the catacombs, and that led the people in charge to be like, hey, maybe we should put some bike locks on this place. Oh wait, those haven't been invented yet? Okay, let's transfer all of the important bones to town where we can keep an eye on them. So San Gaudioso's relics were also taken out of his tomb and transferred to another church in the main part of the city. The problem is, though, is that the presence of the saints' relics, usually their bones, are the reason that people went to the catacombs in the first place. Because no one cares about Joe Schmoe Paleo Christian who died 700 years ago. They care about the big names, and once those bones go elsewhere, so do the worshippers. Long story short, everyone forgets about the catacombs for, you know, a couple hundred years. In the 17th century, someone stumbles across that fresco of the Madonna in child that I mentioned earlier. The fresco had been lost in one of the landslides that compromised the catacombs in the first place. Now, I'm not exactly sure how you find a fresco that's been buried in a landslide, but people find weird stuff all the time. I also assume that the catacombs weren't covered shortly after the fresco, though I can't be certain. Upon learning about this super old fresco, the Catholic Church was like, oh hey, this place is real special. Maybe we should, you know, find someone to take care of it. And they put a religious order called the Dominicans in charge of the site. The Dominicans are basically a fraternity of monks, and they ain't stupid. They look around and they see that they've got something special happening with this fresco and these catacombs. They see an opportunity that is both spiritual and monetary, and they put the elbow grease in to get these catacombs back into business. At this point though, burial in the catacombs isn't just for anyone as it was in the fifth century, when all you really needed to do was be a Christian to be buried there. Over the course of a thousand years, the area around the catacombs, the Sanita neighborhood, had developed into part of the city, and it wasn't just any part of the city. It was the area that became a metaphorical bridge between the center of Naples and the Capodimonte Hill, which is where the royal family had built their residence. Naturally, all the very fancy people want to live as close to royalty as possible, so they all moved into the Sanita neighborhood and set up shop. It was the wealthiest of those individuals who could afford to be buried in the catacombs alongside the Dominican monks who took care of the site, who had the occupational advantage of having a reserved spot for burial. Now, as far as I'm concerned, that is one of the very few occupational advantages of being a monk. Today it's difficult to tell which parts of the catacombs are paleo-Christian and which parts are newer, which is to say 17th century. It's not as if there's a 5th century section and a 17th century section. It's all just a mishmash, and the graves don't look all that different from one time period to another. And I think the graves are the most fascinating part of the catacombs. This is probably a good place to tell you that there aren't any bodies left in the catacombs today. The reason that there aren't any bodies or bones in the catacombs is because in 1837 there was a really bad cholera epidemic in Naples, and the Board of Health required that all of the bones be removed from Neapolitan churches and cemeteries, including the catacombs, and transferred to a place called Fontenelle Cemetery, which is way, way up a hill in Naples. Dear God, I walked so frickin' far to get to that place, but holy crap, it was worth it. Fontanelle Cemetery is a sight to see. It is literally just a massive cave filled with bones. Hundreds of thousands of skulls are piled one on top of another in this cave, and many of those came from the catacombs of San Gaudioso. This begs the question, what exactly is there to see in the catacombs if all of the bones have been removed? As I said earlier, the catacombs are comprised of passageways and rooms, and the rooms do still contain graves, but they aren't the graves that we are used to today. Of course, in a subterranean cemetery, space is at a premium. And what do you do if you need to optimize space? You install shelving. When you stand in some of those burial rooms, you are surrounded on all sides by walls of human shelving. It kind of looks like human-sized cubbies dug into the tufa. When the monks buried the bodies, they would slide the body into one of these slots and cover it with a marble slab, though very few of those slabs remain today. Similar spaces were cut into the ground for the same purpose. What you'll notice about these spaces right away is that they are very small. And that is not because people were smaller back in the day, though that to some extent might be true. Instead, the reason the burial spots are so small is because of a process called schiatto morto. Now, if you're squeamish, I would suggest skipping ahead by about 30 seconds as I explain what this process is. Schiato morto is an Italian word for the process in which a corpse is drained of all fluids before burial, which effectively dries out and shrinks the body. This process is so ingrained in the Burial culture, the undertakers there are still referred to as schiatomorto. Within the catacombs of San Gaudioso, there is actually a room that contains what looks like individual seats cut into the tufa, which are called sedatoi, which in English translates into drainers. That should give you an idea of what these sedatoi were used for. These were niches in which bodies were put as if they were sitting, and strategic incisions were made into the corpse. The bodies were then left for a long time for fluid to drain out of them and collect in little pots underneath them, which sped up the process of desiccating the body and naturally made it smaller and easier to fit into those slots. From what I remember the tour guide telling me, it took several months for the bodies to fully desiccate, upon which the bones were washed and interred. Now I don't really understand if only the bones were left behind or if it was more of like a mummy type thing, but in any case the process took a long time and wasn't terribly pleasant. So in the 17th century, burials were limited to only the wealthy and the monks, because not only was space limited, but it took so much damn time to prepare the deceased's body for those spaces, hence both time and space being at a premium. Also, can you friggin' imagine the monks who had to prepare those bodies and check up on them every few months? I mean, l in contrast to being buried in sloths in the wall or floor, there is also a type of burial called an arco solium, which when broken down etymologically refers to arco or arch and solium or throne. As you can probably imagine, this is a burial space demarcated by an archway that is usually painted or decorated with mosaics, like the tomb of San Gaudioso. The overall effect is one of an altar space, except the place where the altar is is actually a tomb that is recessed into the ground and can hold several bodies, one layered on top of the other with a slab of stone going in the middle. As my tour guide said, it's like lasagna. The Arcosolium tombs were fancier and therefore way more expensive to purchase. It's generally assumed, and I think rightly so, that the families who could afford them were very well to do. They could afford the space as well as the decoration of the archway, which usually contained either Christian symbolism or an image of the deceased and his or her family, who were usually all buried together in that same tomb. Although it can be difficult to tell which area of the catacombs belonged to which time period, there is one area in particular that is distinctly 17th century. This also happens to be my favorite part of the catacombs, and the reason that I cannot stop thinking about the site. The area that I am talking about is a long, wide hallway with individual burial areas that branch off of the hall. The first thing that you see when you walk into this space is a fresco at the end of the hall, which shows a cross with figures mourning beneath it. Underneath the fresco, there is a sculpture of the dead Christ on an altar-like slab. I'll post a picture of this on the podcast's website for you to see. This fresco and all of the frescoes within this space are pretty visible still, as they were done in around the 1600s, so they are quote unquote only about 500 years old. As you walk through the area, the wall space between the arched burial areas also have frescoes on them. But these frescoes are a little bit different. In fact, these frescoes are unlike anything that I have ever seen in all of my years of being fascinated by all things death and art. When you look at these frescoes, you clearly see painted skeletons. But then instead of a painted skull where you would expect to see it, you just see holes in the wall. But upon closer inspection, you will realize that these holes aren't actually holes, but rather the place where the front of a skull used to protrude from the wall. In other words, when seventeenth century fancy people got buried in this catacomb, they had their heads removed from their bodies, their bodies were put into the regular graves that I talked about earlier, and then they had their skulls embedded in the walls between their graves. A painter was then commissioned to come in and fresco a skeleton onto the wall to complete this quote unquote portrait of the deceased. Due to the humidity in the catacombs, all of the fronts of the skulls, which stuck out from the wall face forward, have since disintegrated, but you can still see the back of the skull embedded in the wall. So when you're looking at these things now, those holes are actually the inside of someone's skull. There are about a dozen or so of these portrait frescoes, and each section of the wall has two portraits of deceased individuals, forming a sort of duo, with depictions of men and women on separate walls. Now it's pretty obvious which skeletons are women because, not kidding, the skeletons are wearing skirts. A few of the male skeletons are also dressed in male costume or have certain accessories to mark them as male, such as one that wears a judge's uniform. And I'll give you three guesses as to what he did during his lifetime. Hint, he was a judge. And then of course you would have the occasional sword or armor that marks someone as a soldier. There are even areas where you can still read names or sayings that have been painted above the skull portraits, which is just insanely interesting. All of these portraits were painted by a man named Giovanni Valducci. Now Balducci was basically a B list painter during the Italian Renaissance, who was most famous for training under the painter Giorgio Vasari, the famous writer of artists' biographies and a prolific artist in his own right. Even if you haven't heard of Balducci, you probably have heard of the places where he painted things, such as the Duomo of Florence or the Uffizi galleries in the same city. So it's not like he was some slug, he actually had some extremely prestigious commissions. At some point, Balducci's career took him to Naples, where he was commissioned to paint a series of portraits in the church of Santa Maria della Sanita, which had just been built and the catacombs underneath it reopened for business. But rather than quote unquote traditional portraits, the portraits that Balducci was commissioned to paint were the ones that I just described, death portraits featuring the actual skull of the person depicted mounted into the wall. I think it's safe to say that Balducci was 100% on board with this macabre art project. How am I so sure, you ask? Well, Balducci denied all forms of payment for his work on the portraits. Instead of payment for his work, he requested that he too be allowed to be buried in the catacombs, which is precisely what happened. Upon his death, Balducci had his skull removed from his body, planted into a wall, and was given a painted skeleton body to complete the portrait, which you can still see today in the catacombs. Maybe the weirdest portrait in the entire place is on the opposite side of the hall, where a full skeleton is mounted into the wall. It is literally a full skeleton set into plaster. What's even stranger is that the skeleton was created using bones from multiple corpses. Whoever put this particular bone collage together also felt the need to paint a scythe above the figure's head, which, to be honest, is quite menacing. My tour guide interpreted the figure as a guardian of the souls of the catacombs, which could certainly be true. But I can't help but wonder, is the figure actually protecting the souls, or is he keeping them in? And if he is protecting the souls, who is he protecting them from? Fittingly, this is the final figure that you encounter on your tour of the catacombs before you head back through the gallery of skull portraits. You then snake back through the hallways, past the grave of San Gaudioso, and head back up to the church, leaving behind the world of the dead to venture back into the world of the living. Speaking of the world of the living, let's discuss the fate and resurgence of the catacombs within Neapolitan culture. While the catacombs of San Gaudiozo were not forgotten in modern times the way that they were in the Middle Ages, the 18th and 19th centuries brought hardships for the Sanita neighborhood. The real blow was the construction of a bridge that connected the lower part of Naples to the Capodimonte Hill, literally bypassing the Sanita neighborhood, which had once been a prestigious gate between city and royal palace. After the construction of that bridge, the Sanita neighborhood became a ghetto in the social and geographical sense of the term, as it became an isolated area where living conditions were pretty dismal, and that was true until quite recently. A major aspect of the city's struggles was the lack of proper drainage within the area, which led to mudslides throughout the centuries all the way up to the 1960s, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, caused an insane amount of damage. As with the rest of Naples, the inefficiency of local governance to fix these issues led to the rise of the mafia, which took local governance into its own hands and contributed to the stereotype of Naples as a dangerous, crime-infested city. In the past several decades, however, the Sanita neighborhood has made a colossal effort to improve its living conditions, as well as to rebuild its reputation within the city at large. The Church of Santa Maria della Sanita proved to be a beacon of this change. As the organization shares on its website, the year 2000 was an important one for the neighborhood, as a new parish priest was assigned to Santa Maria de la Sanita and began to actively pursue efforts to reinvigorate the area. These efforts included saving and preserving cultural heritage sites like the Catacombs, while simultaneously creating opportunities for job growth and youth engagement. It is these efforts that have restored the catacombs, preserved them, and made them fit for visitors like me and hopefully like you, starting around 2006. So can we get some snaps for that dude? Snaps, sir, snaps for you. One of the things that I loved so much about the catacombs was interacting with the organization that runs them, the catacomb Boninopoli. I talked to several of the employees who work there, interacted with the organization on Twitter, they actually respond, so you know, some more snaps to you. And I went to three or four of the sites that they manage in Naples. I've also spent hours on the website that it runs. I cannot say enough good things about the work that this organization is doing. To me, it's organizations like the Catacombo dinopoli that demonstrate Naples's renewed commitment to its cultural heritage over the years. But the Catacombi dinopoli is doing more than that. They are creating jobs and encouraging young people to become active members of the community, which is just insanely important. The result is a series of sites that are wonderfully maintained, fun to visit, and genuinely make you think, not just about the past, but about the importance of these cultural heritage sites to the present and the future. I especially enjoyed listening to my tour guide, whose name I believe was Valeria, tell us about the goals of the organization and the people of which it is comprised. It's really just a bunch of young people who want to do something positive for their community and who believe in the goals that they are striving to reach. And it's clear that that's working. The number of tourists who visit the catacombs each year has jumped exponentially over the past few years. And if my experience is like everyone else's, I am sure that those numbers will continue to rise. Ultimately, sites like the Catacombs of San Gaudioso demonstrate that places like it have the power to incite curiosity and wonder. Despite being places of death, it is also clear that sites like this are breathing new life into the communities that care for them by allowing visitors like myself to not only experience local history, but to connect with people who are proud of where they come from and want to share that pride with others. With that, I will end this portion of the episode with another wholehearted endorsement for people to visit Naples, and when they do finally get to the city, to take a tour of the Neapolitan Catacombs. I am confident that you will enjoy it as much as I did. As for now, a virtual tour of the catacombs of San Gaudioso will have to do. I encourage you to go to the podcast's website, stuffabout things podcast.wordpress.com to see all kinds of pictures related to this episode. I will also have links to a couple of sources, including the excellent website run by the Catacomb Beninopoli for your perusal. As for Gus Corner this week, Gus is doing very well. He is currently downstairs doing exactly what we all wish that we could be doing at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night. Sleeping. He has been very smug lately after surviving a bad bacterial infection that has left him with two hairless patches on either of his back legs, which has resulted in his new nickname of Patches. But after a round of antibiotics, Gus is now back in tip-top shape and looking as handsome as ever. I have never met a dog that can pull off hairless splotches as well as he can, but I'm not surprised. As far as his efforts to infiltrate art history goes, in preparation for this episode, Gus found his way into Paul Gauguin's The Day of the God, Johannes Vermeer's The Milkmaid, and Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine. And he was adamant that I joined him in his sabotage of those last two images. So enjoy those on the podcast's website, stuff about things, podcast.wordpress.com. And yes, Da Vinci did paint that lady's hand like that. It's it's super creepy. As always, I want to give a shout out to freemusicarchive.org and hooksounds.com for providing the royalty free music that brings us into and out of the podcast. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod. And the second song is called Success Dream. With that, I will bid you goodbye and adieu. Keep your eyes and ears peeled in the next two to three weeks for another episode of the podcast. I'll talk to you then. Like the hand is so creepy. It's just creepy. Bye.