WHEN IN ROME: The opening of the “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is still a few months away, but organizers will stage a press preview Feb. 26 in Rome. The Met’s deputy director Carrie Rebora Barratt, The Costume Institute’s curator in charge Andrew Bolton, Anna Wintour and His Eminence Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi will be on hand for the warm-up event at Galleria Colonna.
The location of the preview in Italy is a spectacle in itself. The Roman Baroque Galleria Colonna was commissioned in the mid-1600s by Cardinal Girolamo I Colonna and his nephew, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. It was inaugurated by Onofrio’s son, Philip II, in 1700. The architect Antonio del Grande handled the original project, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Paolo Schor and Carlo Fontana enhanced it in the last decade of the 1600s.
The Costume Institute’s main event bows to the public in New York on May 10 and will run through Oct. 8. “Heavenly Bodies” will be housed in two locations — The Met’s Fifth Avenue museum and the Met Cloisters. “Heavenly Bodies” will juxtapose fashion and masterworks of religious art so that patrons will consider fashion’s ongoing engagement with the
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