Madonna and Child with Saints
Pietro Alemanno
Below the image, click play to listen.
Category Archives: Instagram
The Museum & Gallery is a non-profit organization that depends on the financial support of individuals, businesses, and foundations. Your tax-deductible contribution helps M&G to continue transforming lives through our European Old Master Collection and outreach programs for students of all ages!
We’ve added this page to help you consider some of the most popular ways to give to M&G. You can learn about strategies for giving today and strategies for giving in the future. We’ve even included a few once-in-a lifetime strategies. Just click on the arrows below for further information.
We welcome the opportunity to equip you with additional information about any of these giving methods and to discuss with you the best strategies for you to consider. We’re also available to connect with your personal legal, tax and investment professionals. Contact us at contact@museumandgallery.org or 864-770-1331.
Giving Today
Giving Cash
Cash giving is your quickest and easiest way to invest in M&G’s mission of transforming lives through fine art. If you itemize rather than take the standard deduction on your federal income taxes, you can deduct cash gifts up to 60% of your adjusted gross income through 2025 and 50% thereafter. In fact, gifts of cash are one of the surest ways to make your itemized deductions exceed your standard deduction.
- Giving by check: make your check payable to Museum & Gallery, Inc. and mail to:
- Museum & Gallery, Inc.
1700 Wade Hampton Blvd.
Greenville, SC 29614
- Museum & Gallery, Inc.
- Giving online by debit card or credit card: please click here to use our secure form.
- Giving by phone: please call (864) 770-1331
- Giving by wire: please contact us for instructions at (864) 770-1331 or contact@museumandgallery.org.
Giving from Your Donor Advised Fund
If you have a donor-advised fund at the National Christian Foundation, South Carolina Christian Foundation, your local community foundation, or you utilize a gift fund with Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, or other investment firm, you can suggest gifts be made from your fund to M&G. Be sure to instruct the foundation or fund to share your identity with us so that we can thank you for your gift.
Giving from Your Investment Portfolio
When you give shares of appreciated stock, mutual funds, or bonds you’ve owned longer than 1 year directly to M&G, you make an easy, lower-cost, tax-effective gift.
Gifts from investments that have grown allow you:
- To make a generous gift today and not impact your cashflow from your other sources of income;
- To reduce the built-in capital gains tax bill that will eventually come with a portfolio increasing in value.
Plus, if you itemize, you’ll likely increase your deductions and pay less income tax. Your deduction amount would be for the value of the stock on the day the gift is received and not on the price you paid for it. You can deduct the value of the stock gift up to 30% of your adjusted gross income.
For gift of stock instructions, please contact us at (864) 770-1331 or contact@museumandgallery.org.
Giving through Your Employer’s Matching Gift Program
Your employer may offer a matching gift program to double the impact of your gift. To find out if your company has a matching gift policy, please contact your Human Resource department. If your gift is eligible, request a matching gift form from your employer, and send it completed and signed with your gift to M&G. We will do the rest!
Giving from Your IRA Now (QCDs)
If you are age 70½ or better, your traditional IRA may be the best source for your annual or special project giving.
Qualified Charitable Distributions—QCDs—allow you to give funds from your IRA directly to M&G. For 2024, you can give up to $105,000, and the gift counts toward your required minimum distributions which take effect once you reach age 72 (73 if you reach age 72 after Dec. 31, 2022).
This strategy could be a benefit if you would rather make a generous gift today than recognize the taxable income from some or all of your IRA distribution once you’re required to take distributions. For Planning Tips and simple instructions, download our QCD tip-sheet.
Giving in the Future
Giving through Your Will or Trust
You can give to M&G through your will or trust and know that you will be transforming lives through fine art for years to come. These gifts—known as bequests—are a great way to memorialize your legacy of giving to M&G or make a major gift without impacting your current cash flow or available assets.
Through your will or trust, you can give:
- A specific amount or a specific asset,
- A percentage of your estate (the most common!), or
- What’s left of your estate after gifts to other beneficiaries.
Additionally, your gift can be contingent on your spouse or other beneficiaries predeceasing you.
Giving through Your Life Insurance
The simplest way to give using a life insurance policy is to name M&G as a beneficiary of the policy. You can use the policy to benefit loved ones and M&G, M&G if your loved ones predecease you, or M&G exclusively.
You can also transfer ownership of the policy to M&G. If it’s permanent insurance, we can liquidate the policy and put the cash value to immediate use, or you can continue paying the premiums on the policy to M&G. The paying of the premiums to M&G create additional charitable deductions.
Giving through Your Retirement Plan or IRA
With a simple beneficiary designation form provided by your plan administrator, you can name M&G as a contingent, partial, or exclusive beneficiary of your unused retirement plan or IRA balance. This is a great way to make a significant gift in the future without impacting investment growth before retirement or cashflow during retirement.
If your retirement assets are funded pre-tax—like a traditional IRA or 401(k)—your loved ones will pay income tax on distributions to them at their tax rate. M&G will benefit from the total of any distribution without any tax reduction in the value of your gift. Additionally, naming M&G as a beneficiary may generate estate tax savings.
When making a future gift by beneficiary designation, please include the following information to ensure your gift is realized:
- Museum & Gallery, Inc.
1700 Wade Hampton Blvd.
Greenville, SC 29614 - M&G’s EIN: 57-0956189
The Museum & Gallery Legacy Society – We Want to Celebrate You!
If you have included a gift for M&G in your will or trust or by other beneficiary designation, please let us know. We would like to thank you and celebrate your gift. We can also prepare in advance to honor your wishes and preserve your legacy until Christ returns.
The memory of the righteous is a blessing.
Proverbs 10:7
Once-in-a Lifetime Legacy Opportunities
Giving Your Real Estate
Your primary residence, vacation home, vacant land, or commercial property are all assets that you could give M&G. If not for M&G’s own real estate needs, the property can be sold by M&G and the proceeds put to work in programming, art acquisition, or added to the endowment.
- Giving it Now: Real estate given during your lifetime can generate a significant charitable income tax deduction based on the fair market value of the real estate. Plus, you avoid paying capital gains tax on the sale of the property.
- Giving it Later: You can give your real estate to M&G after you’re done enjoying it either:
- Through your will or trust, or
- By transferring it now but keeping a life estate for your lifetime.
Giving of Your Business
If you’re an entrepreneur, whenever you first think about selling your business or are planning the transfer of your business to your children or partners, you have an opportunity to make a generous gift to M&G. You can often generate a significant charitable income tax deduction and reduce your capital gains tax.
Planning Tip: If you would like to explore making a gift for the sale of your business, the ownership interest or shares in your business must be transferred to M&G before you have a contract for sale of your business. Be sure to consult with your legal and tax advisors early.
We’re Here for You
If you have any questions or want to explore your personal options, please contact us at contact@museumandgallery.org or 864-770-1331.
Where we choose to store our treasures depends largely on where we think our home is.
Randy Alcorn
Old Testament Characters: The Prophet Balaam; David, King and Prophet; Solomon, King and Prophet; The Prophet Zechariah
Master of Riofrio
Below the image, click play to listen.
St. Anthony of Padua
Oil on Canvas, 1658
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino
Cento, 1591–1666
Long before social media, opinions were influential. And, in art history, opinions have affected perspectives toward artists and their work for entire generations. One example of this is the brilliant philosopher of the Victorian era, John Ruskin, who was an art critic that championed JMW Turner, Britain’s greatest landscape painter. Ruskin preferred and praised the contemporary artists of his day such as Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, the art prior to Raphael, and the Gothic style.
In contrast, Ruskin’s opinion about the Italian Baroque period can essentially be summed up by his reaction to one painting in the Brera Gallery in Milan by Guercino, “partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous” (Ruskin, p.203). He classified many of the great seventeenth-century painters within what he labeled “the School of Errors and Vices” (Ruskin, pp.144-45). Such strong views influenced the collecting habits of collectors and museums in Europe and America for several decades. Consequently, Baroque artists are still recovering from the stigma; their names are not as well-known as the Renaissance masters even though their skill is of equal quality.
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino was one of the most important and talented painters of the Italian Baroque period. He hails from the region of Emilia-Romagna, born in the small town of Cento, which is close in proximity to the artistic centers in Ferrara and Bologna. He was largely self-taught (influenced by works of Ludovico Carracci and Caravaggio), although he studied with local artists Paolo Zagnani and Benedetto Gennari.
Guercino’s nickname means squint-eyed or cross-eyed possibly due to an eye condition, yet this disability didn’t seem to affect his work. Ludovico Carracci praised him in Bologna, and his “genius was recognized by the Bolognese canon Padre Antonio Mirandola, who became his earliest protector and obtained the artist’s first Bolognese commission in 1613” which established his career. “He was then patronized by the papal legate to Ferrara, Cardinal Jacopo Serra,” Duke of Mantua Ferdinando Gonzaga, and the Bolognese cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, who later become Pope Gregory XV— summoning Guercino to Rome in 1621 (de Grazia, p.157).
Guercino study of St. Anthony of Padua from Glasgow Museums
Following the pope’s death in 1623, Guercino returned home to Cento to work, painting a wide range of subjects and drawing countless distinctive studies in red chalk and ink. As an artist, he was truly inventive, a real creative. He would put his ideas to paper very quickly and spontaneously—something his biographer Malvasia described as guizzanti, meaning “dart with a flick of a tail, as fishes” (Brooks, p.12).
Among other requests, he was asked to become official painter to the courts of England (1626) and France (1629 and 1639). After the death of his archrival Guido Reni in 1642 he moved his studio to Bologna. By the 1650s, his European patronage had tapered to more local commissions, which is when M&G’s painting was made.
St. Anthony of Padua features the thirteenth-century Doctor of the Church, who was born in Lisbon. He joined the Franciscan Order (represented by the dark brown robe and tonsure haircut) and became a close friend and follower of Francis of Assisi. He had a vast knowledge of scripture and was a gifted preacher, serving in France and Italy including Bologna and Padua, where he died. After his death, he was made the patron saint of Padua.
In art, Anthony is depicted in various scenes describing events from his life. M&G’s subject is the vision of the Virgin and infant Christ—a common theme during the Counter Reformation. The vision came while Anthony was in his room, and he is portrayed with a book (which identifies his learning), lilies (representing his purity), and a crucifix (in the shadows above the lilies).
At the time of acquisition in 1973, M&G’s founder knew that this painting was referenced in the artist’s account books—it was one of two St. Anthony altarpieces recorded. The great Guercino and Baroque specialist, Sir Denis Mahon wrote Dr. Bob, “I have no doubt whatsoever from studying the painting itself that it is an authentic late work by Guercino…. It was the lower half of a picture which had been very much bigger…. It follows that the picture is likely to have originally been a full-size altarpiece” (M&G files).
In the 1990s, Richard Townsend found that of the two St. Anthony altarpieces referenced in Guercino’s account books, one was still in Verona and the other cut in two and sold. This work remained a mystery, until recent years when Italian art historian Enrico Ghetti pieced together the history based on the confusing details in Guercino’s Book of Accounts and Malvasia’s biography. M&G’s painting was once called the Madonna and Child with Saint Anthony of Padua and paid for in 1658 by Pier Luigi Peccana (from Verona) most likely on behalf of the Marquis Gaspare Gherardini. The altarpiece used to hang in the Chapel of Saint Antony at the Capuchin church of Verona.
Ghetti Reconstruction
Ghetti suggested the painting, Madonna with Child, which was formerly in the Sgarbi collection in Italy is most likely the upper portion of our work; he has proposed a reconstruction of the dismembered altarpiece as seen here.
M&G’s painting reveals some of the standard matters art historians encounter regularly: the influence of art critics like John Ruskin, the connoisseurship of art specialists like Sir Denis Mahon, dismembered altarpieces, and confusing primary records for art scholars like Enrico Ghetti to ferret out. More importantly, this interesting work represents one of the most notable and innovative Italian painters of the seventeenth century.
Erin R. Jones, Executive Director
Bibliography
Brooks, Julian. “Characterizing Guercino’s Draftsmanship.” Guercino: Mind to Paper. Getty Publications: Los Angeles, 2006.
De Grazia, Diane. “Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Called Il Guercino.” Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington: New York, 1996.
Ghetti, Enrico. 2020. “La ricostruzione di una pala del Guercino: la Madonna col Bambino e sant’Antonio d Padova per i Cappuccini di Verona,” Storia dell’ Arte 153, Nuova Serie 1.
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters (vol. ii), ed. Edward T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. George Allen: London, 1903.
Ruskin, John. Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents, 1845, ed Harold I. Shapiro. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1972.
Published 2025
Victorian artist, Eyre Crowe does a masterful job of recreating that moment in the town of Wittenberg, Germany that set in motion the Protestant Reformation.
Macbeth Encounters the Three Witches from Macbeth
Oil on Canvas, signed lower left
Edward Train
English, 1801-1866
During the Victorian era landscape painting became a major branch of English art, and a burgeoning preference for the genre can be seen in the Royal Academy’s mid-century exhibitions. This popularity was due in part to the wide-ranging approach of English artists to the genre. In J.M.W. Turner’s romantic imagery, John Constable’s naturalistic scenes, and William Holman Hunt’s meticulously rendered flora and fauna, Victorians perceived anew the beauty, grandeur, and stunning diversity of the natural world. Through these artists, viewers also discerned that a landscape may be far more than an appealing backdrop.
In this work inspired by Act 1, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the landscape carries the storytelling power of the scene. The chiaroscuro, colors, swirling lines, and frenetic brushwork all “speak.” In a very real sense, Train’s landscape functions as a personified antagonist in his visual narrative.
Macbeth and Banquo, two victorious warriors, arrive upon a wind-swept heath “at set of sun.” There, three witches give them seemingly encouraging news: Macbeth is informed that he will not only become Thane of Cawdor but also “king hereafter.” Likewise, Banquo is told that his progeny will one day rule. Both men are initially suspicious of the hags’ prophecies—until an entourage arrives to confirm that King Duncan has indeed named Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. With this news Macbeth begins to toy with not only embracing but also hastening the witches’ prophecies.
Banquo warns his friend:
. . .Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.
Act 1, scene 3, ll. 124-128
However, the “fair tidings” have already set alight Macbeth’s ambition, kindling the “horrible imaginings” that foreshadow his descent into psychological and spiritual darkness. Before days end, Macbeth (goaded by his equally ambitious wife) will murder the rightful king.
Notice how Train uses atmospheric perspective to create a foreboding sky. His loose brushwork and subtle color blending create an illusion that the lowering storm clouds hovering over the witches are fast moving toward the blood red sun. Soon, what remains of the light will be “put out,” leaving the characters in darkness. The jagged terrain further accentuates Macbeth’s and Banquo’s precarious position. The implied diagonal line connecting these warriors to the witches further heightens the suspense. Notice that the witches on the left look down on Macbeth and Banquo who are “center stage.” This slightly elevated positioning insinuates their psychic dominance. In addition, the shadowy entourage approaching in the distance foreshadows that the witches’ first prophecy will soon be fulfilled, setting in motion the “horrible imaginings” spawned by Macbeth’s musings.
Although scholars continue to debate whether Shakespeare was a Christian, most agree that the “worlds” he creates reflect a clear understanding of the moral law and the human condition. In Shakespeare’s dramas a disregard for the divine order results not only in human suffering (turbulence among men) but also in upheaval in the natural world (tempestuousness in nature). It is not by chance, therefore, that Macbeth’s temptation takes place upon a storm-tossed heath. Nor is it surprising that following the murder of King Duncan raging storms spread across the land, daylight is entombed in darkness, and Duncan’s “beauteous and swift horses have turned wild, broken their stalls, and devoured one another.”
Shakespearean scholar David Bevington says that “Macbeth is in some ways Shakespeare’s most unsettling tragedy, because it invites the intense examination of the heart of a man who is well-intentioned in most ways but who discovers that he cannot resist the temptation to achieve power at any cost.”
One final intriguing detail is the existence of a similar work by Train titled Landscape with Three Mythological Women Stopping the Roman’s Army’s Advance. This work is dated in 1865 a year before the artist’s death. Although the painting has the same setting as M&G’s Macbeth, it is from a different vantage point. Perhaps Train was exploring how vantage point might alter mood. In any case, the 1865 landscape is less poignant and evocative in its narrative power.
Donnalynn Hess, Director of Education and Bella Vita Sanders, Research Intern
Bibliography
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington
Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood
Published in 2025
Laborers in the Vineyard
Lamb Studios
Below the image, click play to listen.
