Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
Catholic clothes at the Metropolitan Museum
Aside from one incredibly rude guard who would be at home torturing Riker inmates, it was a lovely visit. In the Anna Wintour – What a giggle – Costume Center, Catholicism displayed its visual strength through gorgeous costumes and stunning jewelry. Hushed, like a church, people gazed or frowned at the jewel infested crowns, some muttering about how many poor people the cost of that crown would feed. Catholic hierarchy understood how beautiful architecture, sculpture, paintings, seep into an innocent’s subconscious, establishing an eternal bond. The wily Jesuits claimed that if they got you by seven, you were theirs for life. Seventeenth century popes, Urban VIII and Alexander VII, were forerunners of today’s CEOs. To counter the reformation, in addition to the Inquisition, they worked Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s pious fingers to the bone. I took this photo at Villa D’Este, a sixteenth century summer palace for one of the Estes family. It’s Bernini’s Oval Fountain, set against a rustic shrine dedicated to a nymph. Among his many masterpieces, Bernini is known for The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne as well as his work on St. Peter’s and the Four Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona.
Graphic Lessons: Recent thirty-five-year-old widow Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a stabbed and dying man in the school kitchen, deals with the only witness to the stabbing – a troubled nine-year-old, develops a crush on a NYPD detective and her dog dies.
Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.
Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned a murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed while Kulchek was buying cigarettes? Escaping an attempted car bombing? His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School? Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?