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Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's bango. Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I am so excited to be here today with the fourth episode of the show. Who would have thought that this little podcast would have ever gotten to a fourth episode? Certainly not me, and I made the dang thing. And you guys. It is our first content-based episode. Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop. And for episode four, and our first content-based episode, I will be talking about one of my favorite works of art of all time, which is Niccolo Delarca's Lamentation of Christ. Now I might stumble my way through this one because it is real weird having to talk about art without pictures, but I think that I can do it. That being said, at any point during the episode, before, after, during, all three, whatever, I would encourage you to go to the podcast's website, which is stuffabout thingspodcast.wordpress.com, to see images of this beautiful work. It is magnificent. I will also post any information about my source material on the website so that credit can go where credit is due. I am still figuring out how it is best to approach an episode like this, especially when people are not so familiar with the artwork in question. This will be a little bit like trial by fire. So what I'm going to do is start with a very brief description of the work so that you have some idea of what it looks like, and then I'll give you some background on where it is, who made it, and how it came to be. I will then return to the work and really dig in and attempt to make it come alive in your mind. And I will finish with some personal reflections on why I chose the work and what the work means to me. That's the game plan. We'll see if it works, and if it doesn't, we can always just change it up in the future. Without further ado, let's jump in to The Lamentation of Christ by Niccolo Dellar. The Lamentation of Christ is a sculptural group, which means that there are a number of individual standalone sculptures that all come together to create a single work of art. Each sculpture in the group represents a person or a character, and each one of those figures is life size. There are seven figures in total, including the central character of Christ, whose body lies on the floor as six other figures surround it in a semicircle. As the title suggests, the lamentation of Christ, the scene is one of lamentation or of grief. The six figures that surround Christ each react to his death in his or her own way, and that creates a distinctive array of reactions that range from extremely violent to reserved. The entire effect of the group is one of a theater scene frozen in time, with you as the viewer becoming a participant in the scene simply by being present, given that all of the figures are more or less your size. The figures are all made of terracotta, so each one is predominantly a terracotta color. The, or basically an earthy burnt orange color. Think of a flower pot, that kind of color. Back in the day when Nicolo Delarca completed the sculpture, it was fully polychrome, meaning that the figures were painted to be hyper-realistic, as if they really were actors in a play that had somehow gotten paused at the moment of highest emotion. Even today, you can still see remnants of the original polychromy or paint on the surface of the terracotta, which gives you like some kind of idea of what the original coloration on some of the figures would have looked like. Of course, I wish that we still had the original polychrome, but ultimately this thing is over 500 years old. And the fact that some kid hasn't tried to tackle one of the figures yet and just like smashed it to bits is a freaking miracle. So I'll take what I can get. Even without the original polychromy, you as the viewer still feel like you are part of this scene. Though how we experience the sculptural group today pales in comparison to just how realistic the group would have been during the 15th century when it was freshly painted. Think of a Madame Tussauds type of scene, but in terracotta. Only a smidgen less creepy and way, way more religious, and you'll be on the right track in terms of visualizing the work. I'll return to focus more on the individual sculptures a little bit later in the episode. But first I wanted to give you some background, such as where the Lamentation Group is, who made it, how it was made, who commissioned it, and how the sculpture functioned within its given contexts. So without further ado, let's jump in. The Lamentation is located in the church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna, Italy. Now I have a particular soft spot for Bologna because I studied abroad there for 11 months, my senior year in college. I lived there, I played there, I paid bills there, I took exams at the university there, I got into trouble there. Bologna was my place for 11 months of my life, and it is a very special place at that. Bologna is also an interesting city, especially now, though I do think that it's safe to say that conceptually, Bologna today is similar to what it was like in the Renaissance when Niccolo Delarca made his beautiful lamentation group. Mind you, I was not alive during the Renaissance, or was I. But from what I know about the city both then and now, it isn't fundamentally different. And the reason it isn't fundamentally different is because Bologna, at its heart, still maintains the institutions, traditions, and geographic benefits that made it a prominent peripheral city during the Renaissance. It isn't a huge city, but it also isn't a small city. And because of its location midway between Florence and Venice, it has since become a transportation hub. Because of that, even today, you get a lot of people coming and going. And in the Renaissance, it was the same way. A lot of artists passed through Bologna. Even Michelangelo spent some time in the city, which I mean it's Mickey Ange. That's that's no small potatoes there. Only big potatoes there, sir. One of the primary reasons why Bologna was and is such an important city is because of its university, the Università di Bologna, which is one of the oldest universities, if not the oldest university, in Europe. Though there are some squabbles about that one. The Parisians will try to tell you that that is not true, that Pachy was the first city in Europe with a university, but the Bolognese, I mean, they're they're feisty. They'll tell you where to stick your sausage on that particular one. Um, and hint hint, it's nowhere good. Bologna is also a city with a motto, which is La Rossa La Grossa La Dotta, which translates to the red, the fat, and the educated. AK me and red lipstick, what what? Just kidding, I'm not fat, I'm fluffy. The city has this nickname, La Rossa La Grossa La Dotta, which is just fun to say, because each one of those words represents a major part of the city. La dota, meaning the educated, because of the university. La grossa, meaning the fat, because the food is very rich and uses a lot of red meat. And you know, is the reason I gained 15 pounds when I lived there? Oops. But the word that I am most interested in today is La Rossa, meaning the red. Bologna has the nickname the red because terracotta is the material of the city. When you are flying to Bologna and you start your descent into the Guglielmo Marconi airport just outside the city, all you see as you go over the city is just this sea of terracotta roof tiles. Everything about the city has this earthy, warm glow to it, and terracotta is at the heart of that. Recently I had a professor say that terracotta is the material of Italy, but I think it's more accurate to say that terracotta is the material of Bologna. It is literally what the city is made out of. And keep that in mind because I will return to that at the end of the podcast. The reason that I emphasize the city's nickname as La Rossa is because Nicola Del Arca, as you know, you smart people, he made the Lamentation of Christ group entirely in terracotta. Terracotta is, of course, a kind of clay that the artist shapes and then bakes in a kiln, which is a sort of specialty oven type thing, and that's how terracotta got its name. The name terracotta literally means baked earth in Italian. Terra meaning earth and cotta meaning baked. Terracotta is a very versatile material. Not only is it easy to source terracotta from the area around Bologna, but terracotta is also super cheap compared to other materials like bronze and marble. And y'all know how I feel about cheap stuff. I love it. As an artistic material, terracotta is extremely versatile because artists can achieve certain effects in terracotta that they wouldn't be able to create with something like marble, because marble is so fragile and it's carved using a subtractive method. So one false chisel move and it's all over. Whereas terracotta is sculpted using an additive method, which I will discuss shortly. In addition to allowing artists greater freedom in what they could create, the very low price of terracotta as a material encouraged artists to further experiment and try new things that they would not try, if they were smart, in more expensive materials like bronze and marble. Because if you screw those up, you are S-O-L, and probably S O M, so out of money. And then after that, you're probably SOJ, so out of a job. That being said, terracotta is almost universally considered a lesser material in terms of both monetary and metaphorical value. Yes, it is monetarily less expensive than marble and bronze. Like way, way, way, way, way, way less expensive. And therefore, it doesn't have the connotations of luxury that those other materials do. I also think it's safe to say that terracotta is also an easier material to work with. Obviously, marble is extremely hard, as in physically hard, and that makes carving it very difficult. And bronze requires all sorts of shenanigans to turn into a sculpture. Because of that, terracotta often gets written off as a lesser artistic material. It's not as impressive because it's easier to work with. Terracotta is also a material that is very closely associated with popular religion. And anything that is considered popular, which is to say, of the regular people, of us normal plebeians, is often seen as being less important than the more high-minded kinds of art. And the reason that terracotta is so prominent within the context of popular religion is because it was so much more feasible for a small or medium-sized church to be able to afford a work of art in terracotta than in other more expensive materials. And because of its material properties, terracotta could also be utilized to create super hyper-realistic sculptures, like Niccolò Delarca's Lamentation, which could serve the church as a religious tool to bring worshipers into closer psychological contact with the divine, with whatever subject matter the sculpture depicted. I also think that anyone denigrating terracotta sculpture as some sort of loser art form due to its close relationship with popular religion need to check thyself before ye wrecketh thyself with your elitist thinking. Because I'm of the opinion that art that serves a broad swath of the population is just as important, if not more important, than the exclusive, expensive stuff that you find in the higher echelons of societe. One of the reasons that I love terracotta so much, and it's by far my favorite material to study as a student and as a scholar, is because, like, literally everyone knows what it's like to work with clay. We all played with clay as kids, we all made art projects from it in school, and if you were anything like me and you have parents who live in the country where there is clay sediment, you got clay chucked at you as a child by your three older brothers. Maybe that's where my fascination with clay comes from. It's just this residual childhood trauma desperately trying to heal itself. At the end of the day, though, material is just material, and you need an artist to work his or her magic upon it. And Niccolo Dellarca was a magician in terracotta. In terms of Nicolo Del Arca's background, art historians don't really know a lot about him. His name, Nicolo Dallarca, or in English, Nicolas of the Arc, was a name that was given to him after he completed one of his more famous projects, which is the tomb of Saint Dominic in Bologna, also known as the Ark. But art historians aren't even sure when Nicola was born or where he was born, though most think that he was born sometime between 1435 and 1440 in the region of Puglia, which, if you think of Italy being shaped like a high-heeled boot, Puglia would be the stiletto heel portion of the peninsula. I'm actually going to Puglia in a couple of weeks and I am so excited. The reason that art historians believe that Niccolo hails from Puglia is because before earning the moniker dell'Arca, he was simply known as Niccolo di A Puglia or Nicolas from Puglia. Artists during the Renaissance rarely had last names because at that time only aristocratic people had surnames and most artists weren't noble. So artists often used a surname or took on a surname that indicated where they were from rather than what family they were from. So for example, if I were an artist during the Renaissance and I was not noble, though I know it's it's real difficult for you to think of me not being royal, I would be known as Lins di Ballaverde or Linz of Green Bay. Italians just they can't say Lindsay, so when I'm in Italy, I go by lines. But I am going to start putting Lins di Ballleverde on all of my stuff. All of it. Okay, back to Niccolo. Niccolo is documented in Bologna as of 1462. In that same year, he was commissioned to create the Terracotta Lamentation Group by the Confraternita de Batuti Bianchi, which is a confraternity of flagellant Franciscans. Not flatellent Franciscans, but flagellant Franciscans. Big difference. Being a flagellant Franciscan meant that the members of this confraternity would incorporate what we would now consider to be self-harm into their prayer practices, such as whipping their backs was a popular thing to do. And they believed that this practice brought them closer to Jesus and his experience of being tortured before he was crucified. So a pretty intense form of worship. Not my kind of worship, mind you, I'm more into naps than self-flagellation, but that's, you know, that's just me. The confraternity commissioned Niccolo to make this lamentation scene to adorn the church that they were caretakers of, the Church of Santa Maria della Vita, or Saint Mary of the Life. So named because it was associated with a hospital for the poor and the infirm. And the church, though it's no longer associated with the hospital, that doesn't exist anymore, the church still has its great position within the city. It's located just off the main square, Piazza Maggiore, on one of the main side streets in that area, the Via Clavature. And I happen to know that street very, very well because there is a Mac cosmetic store just down the block. Back in the 15th century, the Church of Santa Maria della Vita was one of four main pilgrimage churches in the city, which meant that on religious feast days, worshippers would visit each one of those four churches in a sort of, I don't know, religious round robin type of thing, and they would pray at each one of them. In 1464, the lamentation scene became part of that process of worship. In that year, the Pope at the time wrote a bull of papal indulgence, basically like a religious rule, saying that if people went and prayed at the lamentation scene within Santa Maria della Vita, those worshippers would receive a special blessing. That blessing usually resulted in a sort of commuted sentence for the time one's soul spent in purgatory after death. Basically, indulgences were like the Bitcoin of the Renaissance. No one could quite explain how the currency worked, but you wanted to build up credit just in case. It took Niccolo Delarca about two years to complete the sculptural group. That seems like a lot of time, and it is, but when you think about the artistic process, it actually isn't that long. I mean, I still have posters and photographs that I've been meaning to frame for about four years now, so I can't imagine what it would have been like to complete an artwork like this in such a short amount of time. As I said before, the Lamentation features seven figures in terracotta, and each one of those figures is life size. Art historians don't exactly know how Niccolo made the Lamentation group. I mean, we don't even know his birthday, much less his working habits, but there is a general practice for creating terracotta figures, and I personally think it's the one that he followed. So what he would do is that for each figure, he would start with some kind of wood centering that he could essentially graph the clay onto. He first had to work the raw material of the clay until it was totally void of air bubbles, and then he had to create the figure by adding and shaping the terracotta onto this wooden centering. When the figure was done, he couldn't just put it in the kiln. It doesn't work like that. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of working with clay knows that the firing process does not always go according to plan. One of the greatest enemies in this process is the dreaded air bubble. If there is any air left inside of the clay, during the firing process, that air expands and it has nowhere to go. So the clay goes boom boom, and usually when something explodes in a kiln, it causes other casualties as well. It happened to me almost every year from elementary school to high school because I threw pottery all of those years, and without fail, some douchebag didn't need his or her clay enough and caused whatever crap project they had thrown together to blow up in the kiln, inevitably taking one of my lovingly crafted pots with it. And yes, I'm still bitter about it, can you tell? Another challenge of firing large works in clay is the shrinking of the material when faced with heat. Depending on the size of the figure and the thickness of the clay throughout, different parts of the figure might shrink and harden at different rates, resulting in cracks that will undermine the overall stability of the sculpture. In order to avoid this, Niccolo and whoever was helping him, I'm sure that he had assistance, would create each figure in its entirety, and then they had to fragment the figure, which usually meant segmenting it into three or four horizontal pieces. These pieces would then bake together in the kiln, and once they were done, the artist would put them back together using a thick slip, which is a sort of thick paste made from mixing clay and water. In order to prepare the works to be painted, terracotta figures were usually covered in a thin layer of gesso that primed the terracotta and made it ready for painting. Usually, sculptors who created polychrome sculpture or painting. Sculptures would commission a painter to do that portion of the job. I can't speak specifically to what Niccolò Delarca did, as unfortunately, we just don't know. But as I said earlier, we do know that the figures were fully polychromed when they were installed in the church in 1464. In that year, the Lamentation was installed just a few days before Good Friday, making it ready to take part in all of the religious festivities associated with the weekend of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. This installation date was almost certainly strategic, as Good Friday is the day on which Christians commemorate the anniversary of Jesus' crucifixion and his subsequent deposition from the cross and his burial. The fact that Nicola's Lamentation Group was installed just in time for Good Friday is fitting, given that worshippers would be visiting the church to mourn Jesus' loss on that day. As of Good Friday, pious Christians would have endured weeks of fasting and prayer during the season of Lent, leaving them both physically and emotionally compromised. After all, if you haven't been eating properly and praying profusely for weeks on end, it's bound to cause some psychological strain. But in the eyes of the devout Christian, that strain, that sacrifice, that commitment to discomfort in the name of one's faith promise to bring the worshiper closer to God. So imagine being a worshiper in Bologna on Good Friday after weeks and weeks of fasting and devout prayer, and you make your way into the church of Santa Maria de la Vita, one of the four churches that you would have visited on that day. You walk into the darkened church and you seek out the chapel where you've heard that a lamentation scene has been recently installed, a chapel that was allegedly made to look like the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. There you are confronted by a hyper-realistic sculptural tableau that acts out the lamentation of Christ's followers over his broken corpse right before your eyes. As a tool of worship, the lamentation must have been crazy effective. The group is powerful now when you are a well-fed, well-caffeinated, only slightly hungover tourist. So I cannot imagine what it must have been like on that first Good Friday in 1464. The encounter between the sculptural group and the faithful must have been epically, exponentially powerful. The reason that the work is so powerful is because of the figures. When you look at this work, it is impossible not to be impressed with Niccolò Delarca's skill. I obviously can only speak to what the Lamentation looks like now in its current state. But I'll do my best to explain it as thoroughly as I possibly can. So imagine walking through the cobbled streets of Bologna with all of its sounds and all of its smells it smells bad. And you decide to seek out the church of Santa Maria della Vita after enjoying unbelgiato in the main square of Piazza Maggiore. You find the Via Clavature and you eventually hunt out the unassuming red exterior and green dome of Santa Maria della Vita. You walk up the ten or so steps to get through the door, and you leave the early morning sun and walk into the cool, shadowy interior of the church. You are greeted by the main altar across from you, with its profusion of green and yellow marble and its Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child, and for a second you wonder why the heck all of the other people in the church don't seem to be concerned with what is objectively speaking a beautiful main altar. Instead, you notice that everyone is migrating to the south transept, or the area directly to the right of the main altar. You pay three euro to the attendant blocking your entry, and then you walk into the darkened space of the transept, unsure of what you'll find. And what you do find takes your breath away in the most beautiful and yet horrifying way. The Lamentation is now kept in a fairly dark and pretty small space, having been moved from its original chapel, which has been demolished for centuries. Depending on the time of day, the space can get crowded with tourists. So let's say that you are smart and you go right when the church opens at 8 a.m. You are the first one there, and you walk into this darkened space and are confronted by seven full-sized sculptures behind a black iron grate, all of which are drenched in dramatic light from the floodlights hanging from the ceiling. Whoever decided on this setup knew how to play up the drama of the scene, and they did. It is dramatique. As you stand in this space directly in front of the iron grate separating you from the work, your eyes are irresistibly drawn right to left. But for the sake of building this up properly, I am going to move from left to right. So as you stand in front of this work with Christ's body laid out before your feet, you are confronted with each one of the six mourners, all of whom offer you a different version of grief. You start with Joseph of Arimathea on the far left. Joseph of Arimathea was the individual from biblical stories who helped remove the nails from Christ's body as he was deposed from the cross. Joseph is depicted as a bearded middle-aged man dressed in a smock and a floppy hat. He is on his knees, and he is the only one of the six figures who does not look at Christ. Instead, he looks out as if directly at you with this pensive expression on his face as he loops one of his thumbs into the belt that cinches at his waist. This is a small gesture, but it's an important one because that hand gesture of looping his thumb into his belt calls our attention to the pliers that hang from his belts along with the hammer that he holds in his other hand, which of course calls attention to his role in getting Christ to this place. I am always very touched when I think of Joseph of Arimathea because his role was to actually pull out the nails from Christ's flesh and attempt to lower him to the ground without causing his body further damage. And while all of these figures are biblical individuals, I don't think that the viewer being religious has anything to do with how they comprehend the scene. Because even if you aren't Christian, I still think that you can recognize the role of Joseph, who is at once mourning Christ while also still in shock from what he was just called to do. He still has his tools on him and likely still has the nails that he pulled from Christ's flesh somewhere on his person. And I find that extraordinarily touching. Beside Joseph is Mary Salome, who is a minor character mentioned once or twice in the Bible, but is one of the many Marys who was present at Christ's death. Mary Salome opens her mouth in this wail of a cry as she clutches at her thighs, as if the gravity of everything that just happened hit her at that moment, and she is only just beginning to process it. And then you have the Madonna, who clutches her hands together in a way that makes her elbows jut out as she sobs. Now she is probably the most restrained of the four women in her grief, but it's almost that quietness compared to the others that really gets to me because it's as if she's turning in on herself rather than bursting out like some of the others. Beside her, you have St. John the Evangelist or St. John the Apostle, who is a young man with curly hair, and he cups one of his hands against his jaw as his face just crumples, and what I imagine as silent sobs, the kind of sobs that men are often taught to restrain but have their way of getting out. He is so young, and yet his face is just transformed into a moment of desperate grief. Beside John, you have the two most explosive figures in the entire tableau and the characters of Mary Cleophys and Mary Magdalene. Both of these women appear to be sprinting into the scene from stage right, with their clothing streaming behind them as they burst forward. Mary Cleophys lunges forward even as she throws her hands out in front of her, as if she is physically rejecting the vision of Christ's corpse in front of her. I would also draw your attention to how beautifully Niccolo Delarca rendered her hands, as if he was attempting to convey this horrific grief in every part of her body, down to the tips of her fingers. If you look closely at Mary Cleophys's face, you can actually see her teeth and tongue in her mouth as she opens it in this silent scream. And then you have Mary Magdalene, and Mary Magdalene in this group is one of the most powerful individual sculptures that I have ever seen throughout the history of art. She explodes with grief. Her mouth is open so wide that it's like you feel your own jaw begin to ache. Her clothing just streams behind her as she sweeps in with this unbridled expression of grief. Her entire form is a magnificent eruption of energy, as if her sadness is so powerful that it cannot help but become a physical force to be reckoned with. And then you have the body of Christ, who lays on the ground with his head on a pillow still crowned with thorns. His mouth hangs open slightly while his hands are crossed in front of his groin. And the way that Niccolò de l'Arca has arranged the arms, it highlights the wound in Christ's side that the Roman soldier pierced when Christ was on the cross. You can also clearly see the wounds in Christ's feet and hands where the nails that Joseph of Amithea pulled from his body once were. The figure of Christ is the least impressive artistically, and yet in the scene itself, he acts as the epicenter of all things, the source of all the emotions that have been generated in this moment. And it is clear that Niccolò Delarca never had any reservations about that because he signed this work in the embroidery of the pillow on which Christ's head sits. This shows that he was confident in and proud of this work of art, and rightly so. This entire scene is powerful as is. That's just the word that I would ascribe to it is powerful. It is magnificent in every way, and I cannot imagine how much more powerful and more magnificent it would have been in its original state of being fully polychrome. As if these figures were not clay, but flesh and blood like you and me. Especially if you were a pilgrim during Lent who was hungry because you're eating nothing, and maybe you're a member of the flagellant community and you hurt because you've been whipping yourself. Or maybe you're just a really devout individual and you go to this church and you see this group, and in doing so, you are transported to a different time and a different place. And I think that that is exactly what Niccolò Delarca intended for this work. With it, he wanted to create a religious experience. He wanted to create something that could be a tool for worship. And I poisonly think that he succeeded beyond what the confraternity who commissioned it ever could have imagined. I think that the true power of this work, though, is in its ability to reach those of us who may not be so steadfast in our faith or may not have any faith at all or have a different faith. I think that most people who stand in front of Niccolo Delarca's Lamentation are called to believe in something, even if that something is a split-second desire to believe that these figures are real and that they might come to life at any moment if we sit and watch them long enough. And that to me proves that Niccolo Del Arca is still working his magic across the centuries. And now I'm going to segue into a brief personal reflection on what this work means to me. And I think and I hope that you can tell from the way that I talk about it that it means a lot. So just indulge me here. Last summer I was able to go back to Bologna for the first time since I had studied abroad. So it had been six years since I'd last been there. And I spent many hours at the church of Santa Maria della Vita just looking at the Lamentation group. When you love a work of art, you could stare at it for hours, and that's what I did. And while I was there, I saw many tour groups come and go, but one tour guide said something that I overheard and it stuck with me. And what she said was, Questo parei fatta dalla stessa materia della città, sono la stessa cosa. This work is made of the same material as the city. They are one in the same. And hearing that was a very powerful moment for me. And yet at the time I couldn't really have told you why. I just felt it. But after some reflection, I realized that what the tour guide had said was so true on so many levels. The Lamentation is made out of the same flesh as Bologna. It's part of the city, and the city is part of it. But that also goes beyond a concept of material. My time in Bologna was transformative. I grew up a ton that year. I went through some great moments, I went through some really terrible moments, and I came out on the other side as we all do. But now I'm in a PhD program and I will be writing my dissertation on polychrome sculpture. And the reason that I'm writing my dissertation on polychrome sculpture is because I have a professor, Judy Mann, who has advised me very wisely that when in doubt, you should always return to the work of art that you cannot forget. And for me, that's Niccolo Delarca's Lamentation. There was nothing remotely close to this sculptural group in the 15th century. And this group went on to inspire amazing works in terracotta that I will probably address in a later episode. But it's this work that I cannot forget. And through this work, I have chased other dissertation leads to northern Italy and in a couple weeks to southern Italy and Spain. But when I look at the origins of all of the things that I'm interested in, it always comes back to this work. Seeing this work as a 21-year-old set into course the next seven, eight, nine, ten years of my life, and I probably would not be doing what I am today had I not spent that year in Italy and not seen this work of art. So when I think about what that tour guide said, it meant a lot to me because Bologna and the Lamentation by Nicolo Delarca mean a lot to me and set me on a journey that I am still on and will be on, God willing, for some time. And being able to revisit this work last summer was just a supremely special moment. And when I was thinking about possible topics for the first content-based episode of Stuff About Things, I just knew it had to be Niccolo Delarco's Lamentation. And we did it. So yay! That is where I will leave Niccolo Delarco's Lamentation. It's uh beautiful work, and I encourage you to all go have a look at it on the website Stuff About Things Podcast.wordpress.com. On the webpage for episode four, I will have a bunch of images of the Lamentation that you can go and take a look at, and a list of a couple, well, a few sources that I used to research and write this episode. The primary ones being an essay by Randy Klebenov, a book by Cesare Nuddi, and a smaller book with text by Graziano Campanini. All of the images on the website are ones that I took with my iPhone last summer, and I could have found higher resolution images, but I thought it was fitting to use the ones that I took myself on my own phone. So I hope you enjoy those. Of course, on the episode's webpage, you can also see your Gus content for the week. This week, Gus's person, me didn't have a ton of time to go on many Photoshop adventures, but Gus, he he finds a way, and somehow he managed to worm his way into two very famous works of art The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli and The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali. So I encourage you to go to the website stuff about things podcast.com in order to see those delightful things. Speaking of Gus the Dog, he turned five years old on April 22nd. What what? He was spoiled all day long and even got a birthday frosty paw, which for those of you who don't know, that is the doggy version of ice cream. He also went for his first swim of the year this week in the pond on our neighbor's property, and he was very, very pleased about that. I don't know when the next podcast episode will be, though I will probably record it at my parents' house in Green Bay, which may necessitate something that I can do without access to my university's library. I've got a couple things in mind, but I don't want to commit to a subject just yet. As of mid-May, I will be off for four weeks, beboping around Italy and Spain. My life is so hard. I say these things because I don't want anyone to think that I am giving up on this podcast anytime soon because I am not. Which isn't to say that I have many regular followers, but I do appreciate anyone who tunes in, so I wanted to let y'all know what's happening. As always, I thank and acknowledge the royalty free music that brings us into and leads us out of the episodes. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod from FreemusicArchive.org. And the second song is called Success Dreams from Hooksounds.com. That is all from me this week. I know that this was a long one, but I had a ton of fun recording it, and I thank you so much for taking the time to make it all the way through. I really appreciate it. I would love to hear any feedback on the episode that you might have, so please let me know what you think, either by personally contacting me or leaving a review on iTunes. Once again, thank you for listening. I hope that you take the time to look at something beautiful today, even if it's in the mirror. Oh the prossima. Bye.