When Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ Came to New York, by Vincent J. Cannato

Growing up in the New York metro area in the 1970s and early 1980s, the work of art I heard my parents discuss most often was Michelangelo’s Pietà. The famous sculpture, which resides inside St. Peter’s in Rome, features a beatific and serene Mary seated with the body of the crucified Jesus sprawled across her lap, evoking the great suffering of his death. The sculptor was able to draw out from the marble the intense emotions of pity and sorrow of a mother who has just lost her child.

Many years later I finally understood my parents’ fascination with the Pietà: they both had worked at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Queens where they had seen the sculpture at the Vatican Pavilion. Ruth D. Nelson, who visited the World’s Fair as a child, seems to have had a similar fascination with the Pietà. Nelson, who teaches art history at the College of DuPage in Illinois, has written a captivating and evocative book, Our Lady of the World’s Fair: Bringing Michelangelo’s Pietà to Queens in 1964, that transports the reader back to the magical time when the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows on the site of the old ash heap made famous in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. …