When Michelangelo's 'Pietà' Came to New York

The Catholic Thing

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.
Nelson ably recounts the history of how the Pietà ended up in Queens. Robert Moses, the guiding force behind the World's Fair, as he had been for the 1939 Fair on the same site, lobbied the Vatican to build a pavilion. The Vatican wanted it but made clear that the construction and financing of any pavilion would fall on the shoulders of the American Church. American bishops were understandably lukewarm to the idea at first. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, and the leading American bishop at the time, told Pope John XXIII that if the Vatican could donate a show-stopping work of art from its collection, the American bishops might be able to pull off the project.
The pope agreed to lend the Pietà to the World's Fair, along with a second sculpture: the three-foot-tall, fourth-century The Good Shepherd. Spellman then set about raising money to build the pavilion, with the first major donation coming from the Rockefeller brothers who donated $100,000 on the promise that the pavilion would not charge admission to see the Pietà. Spellman then raised more than 3 million dollars in contributions from American dioceses.
The formal announcement of the Vatican's loan of the Pietà was a boost to the World's Fair but attracted criticism from both the art world and the Italian public. "I don't personally know a professional in this field," said John P. Coolidge, director of Harvard's Fogg Museum of Art, "who would not be happy if the Pope changed his mind." The Roman newspaper Il Messaggero said that John XXIII's decision to send the statue demonstrated "the weakness of the father who cannot say no to his children who ask him to entrust things to them that cannot be entrusted to them."
Nelson explains just how much care and planning went into the packing and shipping of the Pietà to make sure that no damage came to the Vatican treasure, which Spellman insured for $5 million ($50 million in 2024 dollars). One unsung hero of the tale is Edward Kinney, a long-time lay employee of New York's archdiocese. Kinney served as the head of the archdiocesan purchasing board and also ran the purchasing and shipping for Catholic Relief Services, giving him vast experience with moving goods around the world.
Kinney fought with Vatican officials who had wanted to use straw and wood shavings that had been used for centuries to transport artworks, and he ended up winning the argument for a more modern method: buckets full of tiny Dylite foam beads that would cushion the statue and provide protection for its long journey.
Kinney would carefully choreograph every step of the statue's journey from Rome to New York. The crate would cross the Atlantic on the Italian Line's Cristoforo Colombo. It weighed nearly six tons, yet if the ship sunk in the Atlantic, the ...