The visual and material repertoire of Heavenly Bodies has also been fundamentally shaped by the role of allegory in Catholic…
Refashioning gender and modern visual theology
fashion
Time, gender-bending, and the medieval church
There is undoubtedly an element of drag in contemporary women wearing quasi-clerical garb—drag charged with coquettish sacrilege. These women are…
Sexy celibates and unmanly men?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heavenly Bodies features stunning haute couture and trendy prêt-à-porter garments staged with objects from medieval…
The American romance of the not-so-little black dress
The focus on nuns in Heavenly Bodies highlights the historical oddness—really, the queerness—of nuns in the American imagination. It is…
The cardinal’s new clothes?
Perhaps predictably, then, given the show’s nature, Heavenly Bodies thus focuses on Catholicism’s pomp, rather than its poverty. Both the…
On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life
The more closely one examines the Vatican loan, laid out with minimal commentary in the catalog’s first volume (separated from…
The soulful, comic defiance of Heavenly Bodies
Heavenly Bodies surprised me because I was anticipating a celebration of Catholic aesthetics and fashion. It was partly this. But…
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, something dead
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which opened this past spring and will…