ROME – The Vatican’s culture minister joined Donatella Versace and Vogue’s Anna Wintour on Monday to show off a sampling of gorgeous Vatican liturgical vestments, jeweled miters and historic papal tiaras that are starring in an upcoming exhibit of Catholic influences in fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” opens May 10 at the Met in New York and represents the most extensive exhibit of the museum’s Costume Institute, officials said. It also represents the first time some of the Vatican’s most precious treasures from the Sistine Chapel sacristy are being exhibited outside the Vatican.
Along with the papal treasures, the Met show includes garments for more ordinary mortals by designers spanning Azzedine Alia to Vivienne Westwood, all set against the backdrop of the Met’s collection of Medieval and religious artwork.
“Some might consider fashion to be an unfitting or unseemly medium by which to engage with ideas about the sacred or the divine,” curator Andrew Bolton told a crowd of Roman fashionistas and journalists. “But dress is central to any discussion about religion – it affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, it asserts religious differences.”
The exhibit will be spread out among various Met galleries as well as the Cloisters branch in upper Manhattan in what organizers said was a planned “pilgrimage” blending fashion, faith and art.
With Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to “The Mission” playing in the background, visitors on Monday were able to glimpse at a small sampling of the soon-to-be-shipped Vatican treasures: The white silk cape embroidered with gold thread that once belonged to Pope Benedict XV, and the emerald, sapphire and diamond-studded miter, or pointed bishops’ hat, of Pope Leo XIII.
They were put on display at the Palazzo Colonna, a former papal residence in downtown Rome that is a jewel of the Roman Baroque period.
Wearing a cardinal-appropriate red and black velvet tunic dress, Wintour said the exhibit shows the influence of the papacy over millennia.
“Part of the power of the church has been how they look, and how they dress,” Wintour told The Associated Press. “They have this extraordinary presence.”
Wearing his red-trimmed clerical garb and red zucchetto, or beanie, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, told the crowd at Palazzo Colonna that clothing oneself is both a material necessity and a deeply symbolic act that was even recorded in the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
“God himself was concerned with dressing his creatures,” Ravasi said.