Vatican, Versace, Vogue team up for spring exhibit

ROME — Movie buffs will remember the Great Hall of the Palazzo Colonna from the final scene of “Roman Holiday,” when Audrey Hepburn chose royal duty over love, leaving Gregory Peck brokenhearted.

On Monday, the painting-lined gallery hosted royalty of a different sort, when some of fashion’s biggest names met with Vatican luminaries to preview the exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which will open at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 10.

Donatella Versace and Pierpaolo Piccioli, of Valentino, and designers Thom Browne and Jean Charles de Castelbajac joined Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, at the Palazzo Colonna, where journalists got an early look at five of the 40 ecclesiastical garments and accessories that the Vatican is lending to the show. Wintour wore red and black, as did Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s de facto culture minister.

Rewording German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s well-known phrase, “Man is what he eats,” Ravasi said that the same was true of how man dresses. “From the first pages of the Bible, God enters the scene certainly as a creator, but also as a tailor,” said the cardinal, citing a passage from Genesis where God made garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them. “God himself worries about clothing his creatures, and this represents the genesis of the significance of clothing.”

The items lent by the Vatican feature exquisitely crafted clothing and accessories, with intricate patchworks of gold and silver thread embroidery, as well as bejeweled tiaras and miters.