HEAVENLY BODIES COMMERCIAL FULL

HEAVENLY BODIES COMMERCIAL FULL

The hair on every mannequin is also mischievous and joyful, full of surprise (a mohawk made of feathers, or bright red side buns, or hot pink and wet-looking). These keys lock the doors to women, but depicted on Schiaparelli’s gown, on a woman’s body, cinched at the waist, in the riotous color of a sunset, something subversive, or at least playful, is happening. Covered with images of keys embroidered from gold thread and crystals, the keys are like those Saint Peter holds in classic Christian iconography to symbolize the keys he passes down to the holders of episcopal offices of the Church. I am thinking, for instance, of the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s bright orange gown, “ Evening Dress” (1939). But I underestimated the seriousness of the humor in the actual exhibit, and the celebrity images I saw had little to do with it. I figured that playfulness was the campy part of Heavenly Bodies, the most commercial, the easiest to dismiss. I was expecting something playful, but had heard about it only as parody, like the sexy celebrities at the Met Gala wearing crucifixes and winking for the hosts of E!. There was an air of comic defiance, too, something entirely lacking among the Vatican objects. The atmosphere there was one of transcendence and beauty, enough to take your breath away.

Nuns from religious orders with diminutive names that concealed their formidable artistic prowess (Poor Clare Sisters, Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) made all the gorgeous embroideries (shouldn’t the curators have talked about that?), yet the Vatican wing of the exhibit, for the most part, did not surprise or affect me in any way.īut upstairs at the Met, and throughout the entire collection at the Cloisters, it was different. One broach commissioned by the queen regent of Spain and given to Leo XIII, for example, had his name inscribed in sapphires at the center of a clasp containing seven hundred diamonds. (I had missed the Mussolini crown, but one of my students took a surreptitious photo of it and showed me in class the next day.) In the jostle for power, these treasures gilded the bestowal of blessings among Europe’s aristocrats. Elaborately, fabulously embroidered capes, ruby-studded crosses, tiaras, and stoles that passed between the hands of the popes, kings, empresses, and queens of Europe are displayed, including a 1929 gift from Mussolini. The Met’s basement display of the Vatican holdings, for instance, was predictable and replicative, summoning what we all already know about the Church’s relationship with power. But the exhibition also calls into question the restrained conventions of Catholic art, and gestures toward something more soulful and daring. Heavenly Bodies surprised me because I was anticipating a celebration of Catholic aesthetics and fashion.

It managed to be both incredibly soothing and provocative, and it was also just beautiful. Heavenly Bodies permitted us to immerse ourselves seriously in something else. The field trip turned out to be a relief for all of us, those who had been scrolling our newsfeeds incessantly, in horror, but even the overworked athletes cramming in summer credits, the few who had failed Theology in the spring and were trying again, even the three Army veterans with us through the GI Bill, even me. Both the news and the planned outing served as a kind of imaginative elsewhere for my eleven students, who I knew would have rather been anywhere than my hot classroom on Christian Mystical Texts, fulfilling a core requirement three nights a week in the summer. In my class, we talked about it in a stunned, quiet hush. Our class field trip to the Catholic imagination exhibit coincided with that week in June when America learned that cruelties which had seemed, only days before, entirely unimaginable, were actually becoming realized at our nation’s southwest border.

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