![]() The Catholic aesthetic is so pronounced, after all, that the whole Protestant tradition arose partly in response to it. ![]() And they’re often extreme or paradoxical, focusing on collapsing binaries of sacred and profane, good and evil. ![]() They’re often deeply sensual, even erotic. They’re all highly stylized and elaborate, characterized by grandeur, pomp, and pageantry. These pieces of art, different as they are in media and perspective, have a few things in common. And it’s an aesthetic we often find subverted in pop culture, in the bloody, sexual, queer vampire novels of Anne Rice (an on-and-off Catholic convert), or in the highly erotic “cone bra” designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier for pop singer Madonna (who, down to her stage name, is another example of the trope) - hell, even the “Archie goes Grand-Guignol” TV show Riverdale. It includes the world of Catholic artists and writers whose faith was central to the themes of their work - writers like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Flannery O’Connor.īut it’s also an aesthetic we find in, say, the films of Franco Zeffirelli or Martin Scorsese. It’s composed of, of course, specifically religious art, music, and architecture - Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Notre Dame, Bach’s Ave Maria, the medieval German poem “Parsifal,” Bernini’s statue Ecstasy of St. To an extent, the Catholic aesthetic is like pornography: You know it when you see it. Digital composite scan by Katerina Jebb.īut what exactly is the Catholic aesthetic? And what is it about Catholic theology that has created it? The Catholic aesthetic is a “broad church” Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana for Dolce & Gabbana. Heavenly Bodies : Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, featuring couture from fashion luminaries like Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, and Schiaparelli alongside 41 pieces of ecclesiastical dress on loan from the Vatican, will explore the intersection of the sacred and the profane.Įngaging with Catholicism’s influence on major 20th- and 21st-century designers - many of whom were born and raised Catholic - the exhibit will, in the words of the exhibit’s curator, Andrew Bolton, “raise deeper - and even more provocative - contemplations about the role dress plays within the Roman Catholic Church and the role the Roman Catholic Church plays within the fashionable imagination.”įrom 14th-century reliquary crosses to 19th-century papal miters, from a 2013 to 2014 Dolce & Gabbana gown inspired by Byzantine mosaics to a 2001 to 2002 Galliano gown modeled on papal dress, the exhibit will trace the development of a distinctly Catholic aesthetic from the sacred world to the secular. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will launch its biggest Costume Institute collection yet on Monday.
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