Sometimes the docent, the trained guide leading the tour, will choose a specific topic or idea to guide the tour. Last Saturday, docent Patty Callison led a Thematic Tour, titled, “The Art of Storytelling; the Storytelling of Art.”
“With all of the tours, the docents come in on Saturday and choose what they want to do,” Callison said. “This is a Thematic Tour because my other little avocation is storytelling, and I’m always really interested in the stories that some of the art is portraying.”
The first floor gallery, “Art of the Western World,” was Callison’s sole focus for this particular tour. The stories in this gallery, Callison said, have always intrigued her.
“The tour group, an intimate group of four, started at the front of the gallery with a statue of St. Nicholas, the patron of children and sailors.
Callison asked the group what they saw in the piece first, not giving any introduction outside of which piece to examine. She followed this format throughout the tour, always allowing attendees to make their own judgment before she told the actual stories.
St. Nicholas, Callison explained, was a real bishop in Asia Minor during the third century. He would later be heralded as the bringer of gifts, giving life to the story of Santa Claus, though outside of that he has been a part of many miracles of legend.
The legend Callison told was one of a scheming innkeeper who attempted to kidnap and kill three small boys by sticking them in a pickling vat in order to keep his guests fed during a famine.
“One day the local bishop came in and sat down at a table,” Callison said. “The innkeeper was very, very impressed. ‘What can I get you?’ ‘Do you have some wine?’ ‘I have some in the cellar.’ ‘Then I would love that.’”
Callison continued the animated retelling of legend, ending with the story’s climax: St. Nicholas entering the cellar and opening the pickling vat to find the three boys, alive and converted to Christianity.
The statue in the museum, Callison said, depicts this scene of the three boys, ever grateful to St. Nicholas for ?saving their lives.
Many, though not all, of the pieces Callison showed on the tour had religious connections. One nonreligious painting she spoke about came from the Greek tradition.
“Is she for sale?” one patron asked of the painting, which depicts a group of men seemingly fawning over one woman in the center of ?the frame.
“You are not far off,” Callison responded. “She is a beautiful woman. To the left you have a young man and two older people on their knees. We have a soldier, a prominent soldier, surrounded by his troops.”
The legend of the piece, according to Callison, followed the life of Scipio Africanus-Major, one of the most famous military generals of ?all time.
Callison, near the end of the tour, told the group her knowledge is limited by what she has studied.
“That’s my caveat, ‘not that I’m aware of’ — and there’s a lot I’m not aware of,” Callison said. “In kind of researching the stories of these paintings, I went into the actual mythology or where there was any historical evidence or what was happening to study a little bit about the lives of the?painters.”
