Pure Sketch

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2026

Pure Sketch

On “Renoir Drawings,” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so the adman sayeth. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) would beg to differ. The Impressionists were not the spontaneous image-makers they were made out to be. Sold to the public on the immediacy of painting directly from nature, these actualistes still held on to their studies and models to arrive at their finished work. Renoir was arguably the least impressionistic among them. A trained draftsman, he returned to drawing later in life to flesh out his most synthetic compositions. His efforts on paper reveal much of this artistic process. As he created increasingly layered iterations, these drawings came to serve as captivating works in their own right.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Boating Couple, 1880–81, Pastel on paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. On view in “Renoir Drawings,” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

“Renoir Drawings,” now on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, is therefore something of an anti-blockbuster blockbuster.1 Even with its marquee name, the exhibition mostly avoids top-line works and Renoir’s core Impressionist years of the 1870s. Instead, the show digs down, at times way down, into Renoir’s paper record to draw up a newly intimate portrait of the artist across a fifty-year span. With detailed drawings packed into two galleries, the exhibition requires close attention, as displays on paper generally do. Works are small, behind glass, and in lower light (at times, also obstructed by glare). But the rewards of this significant show can leave us with a fresh impression of the Impressionist we thought we knew so well.

To get a sense of the importance that the Morgan, with its dual focus on literature and art on paper, has placed on this exhibition, look no further than its curator, Colin B. Bailey. Working with his research associate Sarah Lees, Bailey has done double duty here as the organizer of the exhibition while serving as the institution’s Katharine J. Rayner Director—the first time, in his decade-long tenure, that he has overseen his own show. “As a director of a museum,” he explained at the preview, “it is unusual, and perhaps not always very wise, to embark on a large exhibition, and we have spent seven years working on it.” In other words, as the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Renoir’s works on paper in more than a century, this is an ambitious and expensive undertaking.

We are its beneficiaries, as its results combine significant loans with a thoroughly mined archive of works on paper. The exhibition presents one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and paintings from sixty-two lenders, with a plurality of loans from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, where a version of the exhibition will be on view this spring.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879, Pastel on Ingres paper, The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna. On view in “Renoir Drawings,” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Beyond his sketchbooks, Renoir composed some eight hundred independent works on paper. While other artists may settle on preferred subjects and formulas, Renoir employed his drawing widely, composing portraiture, mythological imagery, landscapes, still lifes, and scenes of modern life. Along the way, he worked through an adventurous range of graphic media: pencil, black chalk, red chalk (also called sanguine), white chalk, Conté crayon, charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, gouache, and pastels, as well as printmaking with etching and lithography. All of the resulting works are fugitive and fragile, susceptible to light and movement. This makes their public exhibition here all the more rare.

A word should also be said for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, which features essays by Bailey, Lees, Flavie Durand-Ruel Mouraux and Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel (scholar-descendants of the Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel), and Anne Distel and Paul Perrin of the Musée d’Orsay. Published by DelMonico Books and printed in Trento, Italy, on uncoated Munken paper stock, each page feels like its own work on paper, with astonishing image fidelity. Those many other museums now outsourcing their catalogues to China, please take note.

While this exhibition has been seven years in the making, its initial inspiration took shape some two decades ago. That was when Bailey saw Study for The Great Bathers (ca. 1886–87 and 1908), a large work in red and white chalk on wove paper lined to canvas, while paying a visit to the home of Drue Heinz. A specialist in eighteenth-century French art and an authority on Renoir, Bailey saw Heinz’s drawing for what it was: a preparatory work related to Renoir’s masterpiece in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but one he had never encountered before.

The surprise reveal suggested how much of Renoir’s art beyond his famous paintings (he made some four thousand canvases) was still out there to be discovered. “Renoir’s works on paper form a considerable part of his oeuvre,” Bailey writes in the lead essay of the exhibition catalogue, but

as a corpus they remain somewhat uncharted, and occasionally treacherous, territory. Accuracy in dating and the correct identification of media are often lacking; a comprehensive and well-documented review of his development as a draftsman over six decades has yet to be written.

In life, Drue Heinz was not only a significant collector but also an important patron of the arts. Among her many philanthropies, she was the founding supporter of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. After her death in 2018, her estate offered the Morgan a work from her collection. Bailey requested her Bathers and set about creating this exhibition around the acquisition in her honor. While not a comprehensive catalogue raisonné, the result does much to advance Bailey’s own call for a “well-documented review of [Renoir’s] development as a draftsman.”

Renoir showed graphic talent from an early age. He drew until the end of his life. According to his son Jean, he “never let a day go by without sketching something.” Following his eldest brother, Pierre-Henri, who was an engraver of medals and gems, Renoir found early work in Paris as a designer, decorator, and draftsman for blinds, emblems, and commercial decor. He also apprenticed to be a painter on porcelain for Sèvres. As he moved on to training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he pursued the traditional course of drafting and figuration and received a copyist permit for the Louvre.

The earliest works in “Renoir Drawings” are those from the early 1860s, with rather arid chalk-and-graphite studies on paper of paintings and sculptures. As he turned to Impressionism in the 1870s, his portrait pastels become a highlight. Here his tender 1879 Portrait of a Young Girl (Elisabeth Maître), on loan from the Albertina Museum, Vienna, is a standout. So too Boating Couple (1880–81), on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Milliner (ca. 1879), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition becomes most illuminating as it gathers studies and versions of the same compositions together. Renoir’s Dance in the Country (1883), one of the significant oil-on-canvas loans from the Musée d’Orsay, is accompanied by a suite of paper studies and related prints on loan from other venues. The same for Motherhood (1885), another oil on loan from the Musée d’Orsay.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Great Bathers, 1886–87, Oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art. On view in “Renoir Drawings,” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

A turning point for the artist, and this exhibition, is The Great Bathers (ca. 1886–87). A suite of seven studies, including the Heinz bequest, is centered around the oil on canvas from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which is only able to travel due to a change in its loan agreement in 2020). Here his drawings are canvas sized, as though he designed to transfer them as one-to-one components, like Renaissance cartoons, to his finished work. The final composition conveys this sense of multipart assembly, with its nude female figures seemingly detached from one another and unreal. Such unreality was no doubt purposeful, as Renoir moved away from the contemporary in favor of an idealized, friezelike antique.

“Around 1883,” the artist recounted to the painter Ambroise Vollard, “I had come to the end of Impressionism, and realized that I knew neither how to paint nor to draw.” Instead he traveled to Italy and took to Raphael. In what is called his rappel à l’ordre, he abandoned being a painter of modern life to focus on the classical nude. The subject matter brought him back to his student days of the 1860s, but now informed by a new Impressionist sensibility for luminosity and color. As he explained to his dealer Durand-Ruel in the fall of 1888, “I have returned . . . to the old style of painting, soft and light. Like Fragonard, but less good.”

Renoir pursued the classical nude into the early decades of the twentieth century. One of the final works here is his Study for “The Judgment of Paris” (ca. 1908) from the Phillips Collection. The related oil, in the Hiroshima Museum of Art, did not travel, but a patinated plaster relief of the composition that Renoir composed with the sculptor Richard Guino is here from the Musée d’Orsay. These final works represent how Renoir carried on even after he became too infirm from arthritis to hold soft media such as pastel and charcoal. (An early film in the museum’s introductory hall shows him at work in old age.)

Throughout his life, friends and critics alike remarked on Renoir’s drafting skills. An early critic for La Liberté called his drawing “neither frigid nor fixed; it is alive, animated, and intelligent. It has infinite delicacy and subtlety.” The decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans compared Renoir to Chardin and said his portraits were even more “captivating, individual, and incisive.” In her journal, the close friend and fellow artist Berthe Morisot called Renoir a “draftsman of the first order” on a studio visit in January 1886, after seeing a suite of drawings in red and white chalk around his Motherhood composition:

He showed me a whole series done from the same model with about the same movement. . . . it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting, to the public, which generally imagines that the Impressionists work in a very casual way.

Across Renoir’s span of four thousand paintings, did he make a bad one? He certainly did. Some of his late-career nudes, such as the bumper crop now in Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection, have long been criticized as overdetermined and fleshy. Judging from the selection now at the Morgan, however, the same does not hold true for his drawings. Provisional drafting may have taken Renoir’s paintings away from the precepts of Impressionism. Ranging across multiple styles and media, his drawings meanwhile remained open, experimental—even, we might say, impressionistic.

1. “Renoir Drawings” opened at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, on October 17, 2025, and remains on view through February 8, 2026. A version of the exhibition will also be seen at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (March 17–July 5, 2026). ↩

America Beautiful

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2025

America Beautiful

On President Trump’s architectural agenda.

Take a walk by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as I recently did, and you might be surprised to find the White House still there as you remember it. You should be forgiven for assuming otherwise, considering the images that have recently played out of wrecking crews tearing away at walls and windows and the commentary that has surrounded this undertaking. “AIA Condemns Demolition of the White House East Wing and Calls for Transparency in Public Architecture,” read a statement by the American Institute of Architects. “Donald Trump’s East Wing demolition trashes First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s queer legacy,” declared The Advocate. “‘Dictator-for-life vibes’: our architecture critic on Trump’s bulletproof ballroom bling,” blared The Guardian. “Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?” the subhead asked.

A better question, beyond the hyperbole, bad-faith arguments, and elitist bigotry, is how successful the president’s many cultural and architectural projects will actually be. With more initiatives revealed by the day, the answer looks to place Trump among our greatest builder-presidents, in line with Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. As Americans embrace his classical, representational, and traditional undertakings, the only real destruction is the loss of the establishment’s cultural hegemony.

The new White House State Ballroom, to be constructed over the former East Wing, is the latest case in point. Trump’s critics may denounce the two-term president as a “king” for the fact they did not vote for him. Far from a royal palace, however, his plans reveal a democratic executive with the popular intelligence of a lifetime in real estate. With funding secured by private donations made through the Trust for the National Mall, rather than by taxpayer revenue (a fact his critics bemoan), Trump has set out to leave a lasting legacy on the White House grounds free of charge.

During Trump’s first term, in a project overseen by the First Lady, the residential architect Steven W. Spandle updated the White House tennis pavilion. That initiative, which replaced Barack Obama’s basketball court and changing-room trailer, faced its own host of critics. Yet the result proved to be a sensitive new addition that restored the elegance of a sport first introduced to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt.

The ballroom likewise updates the East Wing in a similar idiom for a new and much-needed function. Its lead architect is James McCrery II, a seasoned practitioner who began as a modernist working for Peter Eisenman but rededicated his life to classicism under the mentorship of Allan Greenberg. A restrained, classical exterior that borrows from the White House’s existing colonnades, fanlights, cornices, and buff stonework will open onto a more exuberant interior of Corinthian columns and coffered ceilings. Until now, large White House receptions have been relegated to unsightly tents on the South Lawn. With a deferential design that works to conceal its massing, the ballroom will finally provide a secure indoor venue for essential functions such as state dinners while maintaining the East Wing’s existing functions. “Take a breath, folks,” read an editorial in The Wall Street Journal on “Trump’s Big, Beautiful Ballroom.” “There really is a case for a larger hall at the White House for holding big state dinners and other events.” With a capacity approaching a thousand guests (numbers have varied), the venue will also make the president’s home, and the president himself, more accessible to more Americans than before. In a democratic society, such openness might be considered a good thing.

As with any reuse, the project starts with demolition. Here few will admit that the East Wing is not the historical White House at all. It is a side structure, of relatively recent vintage, set apart and built over the presidential bunker. Until now, if we even knew it existed, most of us probably needed a map to find it on the executive grounds. The wing is located about as close to the Treasury Department as to the historical White House. Standing at the White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue, you realize how distant the site truly is.

Such an architectural update does not represent a tear in the essential fabric of our democratic republic, or even so much as a historical snag. For over a century, the nerve center of the White House has been the West Wing, not the East Wing. First designed by McKim, Mead & White under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, the West Wing allowed the executive staff to work outside of the White House’s second-floor living quarters for the first time. William Howard Taft added the Oval Office to the West Wing soon after. The East Wing has been far less significant to the history of the White House, serving as a coatroom, a reception hall, and most recently as the offices of the First Lady.

Regardless of any section’s particular significance, however, the White House has been updated by every president, at times more directly than by its current occupant. Critics complained about Jefferson’s additions, too, but presidents have wide latitude in overseeing changes at the White House and even a duty to keep the executive mansion updated and vital. The White House outbuildings have evolved even more over time, with greenhouses, swimming pools, bowling alleys, and movie theaters coming and going, and far more grandiose plans than Trump’s ballroom put forward over the years. In “Unbuilt White Houses of the Nineteenth Century,” William Bushong details these proposals for the White House Historical Association. Under the presidency of Harry Truman, the White House was even gutted, with bulldozers rolling through the empty shell of the historical structure. Just imagine the outcry if Trump had sent bulldozers through the Lincoln Bedroom.

Read my interview on Trump’s architecture with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (December 8, 2025)

We should not be surprised by the political capital that Trump, a president who grew up working with the built environment, is now spending on cultural projects or his understanding of the transformative power of architecture and art. Through his career in real estate, we knew he exhibited a New York toughness and early on learned the power of the wrecking ball in getting things done. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he made his mark through the brash development of Midtown’s Grand Hyatt New York and his Trump Tower on Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. Both involved the construction of glass towers through the partial or full demolition of historical structures, both as it happens designed by Warren & Wetmore: the Hotel Commodore in Grand Central’s Terminal City and the flagship store of Bonwit Teller.

We might rightly criticize the loss of architectural history replaced by smoked windows and bronze cladding, but Trump demonstrated what it took to build successful projects in what at the time appeared to be a moribund city. His understanding of style has also evolved since then into a more nuanced appreciation of classicism and historical preservation. Following his purchase of Mar-a-Lago in 1985, he restored Marjorie Merriweather Post’s derelict Palm Beach residence designed by Marion Sims Wyeth and Joseph Urban to its original splendor, first as a private home, then as a club property, and finally as his own weekend White House—fulfilling a wish of Post’s that it be used as a presidential property.

At the heart of President Trump’s appeal has been the promise of restoration: the “again” of “Make America Great Again.” What began as a return to American values is now compounded by his own return to power after a Herculean campaign and the prospect of the U.S. semiquincentennial in 2026—the upcoming jubilee that was just about ignored throughout the Biden interregnum.

In the summer of 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump also witnessed what was nothing less than an attempted revolution to overturn the American order. Genuine insurrectionists intermingled with criminals and permissive gatekeepers to target not just statues of American heroes and history but also the classical plinths and pillars representing our national foundations. In “A classical illness,” appearing in these pages in September 2020, I noted how “the association of classical forms with an illegitimate order has long been a central tenet of anti-liberal ideology.”

Trump is ever mindful of the history of radicalism and the capacity of classicism to reflect a return to order. In his second term, this embrace has been unabashed, with a classical eclecticism that is gilded, colorful, and light-filled rather than mere academic historicism. He has promoted shovel-ready projects with a hard deadline of July 4, 2026, the date of the national jubilee. Informed by advocates for classicism such as Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society, the president has also pushed new design guidance, in particular the classical mandate behind the executive order “Making Federal Architecture Great Again”—put forward in the final days of his first term, overruled by Biden as one of his first acts in office, and now recodified. The order overturns sixty years of Olympian modernism enforced as house style that has seen increasingly oppressive results, from the recent borg-like Orrin G. Hatch United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City to the dysplastic polyp of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago—which in its metastasis has usurped historic Olmsted parkland, a fact first criticized in these pages by John Vinci (see “The Obama Library double parks,” December 2016).

Trump’s executive order has far-reaching consequences and is now being extended to infrastructure projects and other sectors under federal purview. Now is the time for Trump to turn his White House wrecking crew on the other eyesores of the federal district’s Brutalist era, from the FBI Headquarters, to the Department of Education, to the Postal Service Headquarters. Taken to its conclusion, his executive order has the potential to restore Washington as a classical city. It also nudges cities such as New York closer than ever to restoring their own classical inheritance. Thanks to its many tireless advocates, we might even see the reconstruction of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station (the original track layout and even some stairwells conveniently remain in place following its 1963 demolition).

Through it all, critics will continue to smear America’s classical heritage. In an astonishing display of racial bigotry, the Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History and Culture has labeled the “primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” as one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.” In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman ties classical architecture to “images of antebellum America” and “authoritarian regimes of the past.” One wonders what such critics would have said if a leftist mob had taken their blowtorches and spray cans to the East Wing. Just this past October, The New York Times saw fit to hail an exhibition in Los Angeles of sculptures made from the desecrated parts of historical statues, taken down in such riots, as “the year’s boldest show.”

Trump’s righteous response has been to redouble his own classical initiatives in the face of elitist opprobrium. In part this has meant commissioning new classical projects. Not long after the classical advocate Catesby Leigh made the case in The American Mind for the construction of a triumphal arch in Washington, timed to commemorate the semiquincentennial, Trump could be seen with the model of an “Independence Arch” sited on an empty roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial. Borrowing from Roman, French, and American precedent, such an arch would extend to Washington the examples set in New York around the turn of the last century by McKim, Mead & White’s Washington Arch in Washington Square Park (originally a temporary wooden structure), Charles R. Lamb’s temporary Dewey Arch by Madison Square, and John Hemenway Duncan’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

Another example of Trump’s classical retort has been his forthcoming National Garden of American Heroes. This initiative picks up from where such institutions as the original Hall of Fame for Great Americans, at New York University’s former Bronx campus, left off (see my “Hall of flame,” November 2017). By commissioning new statues of Americans “chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” as its executive order spells out, the National Garden aims to “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.” Addressing the riots of the years prior, the language of the garden’s executive order is explicit in its response:

Across this Nation, belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity. The heroes of 1776 have been desecrated, with statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin vandalized and toppled. The dead who gave their lives to end slavery and save the Union during the Civil War have been dishonored, with monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Heg, and the courageous 54th Regiment left damaged and disfigured. The brave warriors who saved freedom from Nazi fascism have been disgraced with a memorial to World War II veterans defaced with the hammer and sickle of Soviet communism.

Last summer, I served as a peer reviewer for the applications that came in response to this program’s open call. What they revealed was a deep bench of realistic artists working without fanfare in traditional stone and bronze. Emboldened by the American story, able to craft “lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations,” as mandated by the 2020 executive order, they appear set to invigorate the nation’s foundries and ateliers as never before. The best applicants were those who rose above mere representation to seek out the heroic idealism of their chosen subjects through astonishing craftsmanship and attention to material and finish. The challenge will be to complete these ambitious commissions by July 4, 2026, and have them installed in the National Garden’s to-be-determined location.

In line with the National Garden have been Trump’s efforts to restore those statues attacked in the riots of the last decade. Grants have already gone out to piece together the shattered fragments of monuments to Christopher Columbus. Here we can hope that Trump will push his restoratory agenda to maximal effect. No statue should be canceled by the rioters’ veto or those institutions and municipalities that fell under their sway.

A primary goal should be the restoration of Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue to the New York State memorial dedicated to the twenty-sixth president, in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Sculpted by James Earle Fraser after Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleioni, the sculpture was integral to John Russell Pope’s design for his Roosevelt Rotunda as it looked out from the triumphal arch framing the museum’s entryway. The heroic statue was racially inclusive, pairing Roosevelt with personifications of Africa and the Americas standing “for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” as Fraser explained. A 2018 memorial commission had even determined the monument should stay. Nevertheless, in 2020 the city under Bill de Blasio along with the museum director Ellen Futter decreed the statue to be a “hurtful” symbol of “systemic racism,” and so it went. A counteroffensive now fashioned in the manner of Trump’s review of American universities could finally bring such municipalities and institutions to heel until the return of this cultural patrimony, along with the funds to pay for the statues’ upkeep and protection.

Over a hundred years ago, a movement called City Beautiful undertook a wave of architectural and urban reform. American municipalities, in particular the nation’s capital under Daniel Burnham, reached new heights of enlightened public planning through the studied application of Beaux-Arts and classical design. On the eve of the U.S. semiquincentennial, after half a century of radical deformation, an America Beautiful movement now appears ready to reinvigorate this classical inheritance with monumental fanfare and a president built for such restoration.

Kingdom Come

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2025

Kingdom Come

On “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” at the Frick Collection.

Among the many miracles to come from Jerusalem, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” now on view at the Frick Collection, is the latest revelation.1 The wonders of the works on display, with some sixty-eight individual pieces, are only outshone by the tales of their survival and the connections these treasures maintain to that singular place.

Since its rediscovery in the fourth century A.D., the location of Jesus’s tomb—the Holy Sepulcher—has been the most important pilgrimage site in Christendom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when European monarchs could not visit the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule, the courts of Europe sent treasures to the church built over the tomb for use in rituals and veneration. “To the Holy Sepulcher” represents the first pilgrimage of these objects stateside. The exhibition is the result of an unprecedented loan from the Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan division charged since A.D. 1309 with protecting the Roman Catholic treasures in Jerusalem and beyond. The American tour anticipates the opening of the Terra Sancta Museum, a Franciscan facility now under construction at the Monastery of Saint Saviour, by Jerusalem’s New Gate, designed to safeguard and display these objects back home.

The astonishing history of these treasures is made all the more remarkable by their appearance in New York. As the Holy Land comes to Fifth Avenue, we must thank Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator. He organized this exhibition after first learning about the Terra Sancta Museum a few years ago, with the help of Jacques Charles-Gaffiot and Benoît Constensoux of the Terra Sancta Museum’s scientific committee. The exhibition marks this young curator’s final effort at the Frick before his departure for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is the incoming director. For a scholar so invested in both the fine and decorative arts of Europe, “To the Holy Sepulcher,” we might say, is a fitting swan song of Salomon.

The exhibition leads off with the one item here actually created in the Holy Land: a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself, crafted in the eighteenth century. Be sure not to miss it just outside the gallery entrance; on the day I visited, it was not easy to double back. Carved in Bethlehem of local olive and pistachio wood, mother-of-pearl from the shells of the Red Sea, and camel bone, the dollhouse-like assembly was created to be a gift for Europeans from the Franciscans—a memento from rather than for the Holy Sepulcher. The jeweled model reminds us of all this footprint contains and how this church has come down to us through time.

Look up this church in the index of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent history of the city, and the subcategories give some indication of the site’s vicissitudes:

Church of the Holy Sepulchre: and Arab conquests . . . construction by Empress Helena . . . and Crusades . . . daily rituals . . . and Descent of the Holy Fire . . . destruction by fire . . . Fatimid destruction . . . latrines . . . and Mongol raids . . . and Napoleonic invasion . . . Persian destruction . . . and religious conflict . . . and Tartar conquest . . . and Turkish conquests . . .

The layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is far different from the grand vision of the Vatican or what one might expect from this axis mundi of Christianity (there is, in fact, a spot in the church marking the very axis point). A concatenation of surprisingly small Romanesque buildings, all of which were built, burned, and reconstructed over various periods, the church has been a site of veneration, speculation, and contention for two millennia—and is made all the more wondrous in its strangeness. No two of the extant floor plans of this church look exactly alike. It is easy to get turned around among its domes and passages, its priests and pilgrims. Make a left turn at the Chapel of Adam, where the blood of Christ ran through Adam’s skull; go past the Stone of Unction, where the body of Christ was cleaned before burial and which pilgrims now rub down with oil; and you might come across a wall of medieval graffiti carved to collect its holy dust.

Robert Landry, Reliquary of the True Cross, 1628–29, Gilt silver and glass, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Today the church is located within the Old City, a short walk from the Temple Mount through narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem stone, and is little changed from that eighteenth-century model. In the time of Jesus, the tomb was part of a sloped cemetery that existed just outside the city walls. Following Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Hadrian recast the city as Aelia Capitolina in A.D. 130. Even by then, the tomb had become a site of veneration for the earliest Christians. Hoping to redirect their attention to the Roman gods, Hadrian walled off the tomb, flattened the site, and constructed a temple to Venus in its stead. Nevertheless, the memory of the location endured. Two centuries on, as Rome accepted Christianity with the Edict of Milan, Helena of Constantinople—mother to Emperor Constantine, and Saint Helena to Christians—traveled to Jerusalem and reopened the tomb in 326; her son dedicated the new church on its site in 335. In a nearby well, Helena also discovered pieces of what she believed to be the True Cross. The site of the Crucifixion, known as Calvary Hill or Golgotha, is just 150 feet from the tomb and was soon incorporated in the church grounds.

Regarding the tomb’s history, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his introduction to Helena, his historical novel of 1950, that

if we do accept its authenticity we must, I think, allow an element of the miraculous in its discovery and identification. We do know that most of the relics of the True Cross now venerated in various places have a clear descent from the relic venerated in the first half of the fourth century. It used to be believed by the vulgar that there were enough pieces of this “true cross” to build a battleship.

Much as Waugh encountered them, today the tomb, Calvary Hill, and Helena’s well—in addition to archaeological evidence of Hadrian’s Temple of Venus—are all connected under one roof within the warren of buildings that comprise the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Making this real estate even more complex—and explaining its general appearance of deferred maintenance—the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches all share in the church’s administration under an arrangement reached in 1757, in the days of the sultan, known as the Status Quo.

“To the Holy Sepulcher” is made up of a selection of precious objects used by the Latin church in its annual rituals around the site and in other places under its protection in the Holy Land. Only recently have these objects been, like the tomb itself in Helena’s day, brought to the light—in this case, after the Cuban Italian scholar Alvar González-Palacios began researching them in the 1980s and exposing them to the greater museum world (his fascinating story gets its due in the exhibition’s lavish catalogue, which also features updated photographs of these freshly cleaned treasures).

Before then, as the Franciscan custodians tell it, these treasures were hidden in plain sight—brought out for special ceremonies but otherwise squirreled away in closets and storerooms, miraculously safe from looting, vandalism, and whatever authority was ruling Jerusalem at any given time. In fact, the greatest threat to such treasures has come from intrachurch rivalry. A sanctuary lamp (ca. 1758–59) of gold and gilt silver attributed to Johann Caspar Kriedemann, showing reliefs of episodes from the life of Christ, was most likely created from the gold of earlier Latin treasure that had been destroyed by the Greek clergy in an attack on the eve of Palm Sunday in 1757. The same goes for the pair of torchères from 1762, remade in Venice by the workshop known as al San Lorenzo Giustinian from the 1,304 ounces of silver recovered by the Franciscans from those destroyed and stolen treasures.

Al San Lorenzo Giustinian Workshop, Torchère, 1762, Silver and gilt silver, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges faced by the church and city, the many treasures in Franciscan custody at the Holy Sepulcher have fared far better than their counterparts in Europe. “To the Holy Sepulcher” contains examples of European metalwork that are otherwise no longer extant—melted down long ago for their raw materials. The sections of the exhibition are therefore divided by region of origin, denoting the French, Iberian, and Germanic sources of these gifts given by European monarchs to Franciscan emissaries for delivery to and use in the Holy Land.

It is, after all, the continuous liturgical function of these ritual objects that has defined their design and sustained them. “Their survival over the centuries is a direct result of their continued use,” says Salomon. As the outgoing director of the cultural heritage office at the Custody of the Holy Land, Friar Stéphane Milovitch explained at the Frick opening, “If the Ottomans knew we had all these kinds of things, they would have liked to take it. So during many centuries we use and we hide—but we used.”

To understand such metalwork and textile, it helps to envision it carried, elevated, illuminated, and worn. At the opening, I met one friar looking at the subtle wear on a section of fleurs-de-lys on a crozier (1654–55) created by Nicolas Dolin. He wanted to see just where the bishops grasped this imposing pastoral staff of gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stones, made in Paris and given to the Franciscans by Louis XIV.

Nicolas Dolin, Chalice, 1661–63, Gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stone, Terra Santa Museum, Jerusalem.

A special alchemy takes place when such treasures of sculptural relief, created from metal and stone, are held in the lamplit liturgies of the church. Objects such as Dolin’s chalice and paten (1661–63) and Jean Hubé’s ciborium (1668–69) are so finely detailed, with minuscule images from the life of Christ alongside symbols of the holy ancestors of the French kings, that these messages are more intended to be felt than seen. While European monarchs could not travel to Jerusalem in person, their presence was conveyed to the holy altars through the symbolism preserved in these finely wrought materials.

To encounter such objects in a museum setting is therefore a trade-off. Salomon has done what he can to reproduce an altarlike feel in some of these displays, with vested mannequins arranged among the treasures. Nevertheless, we experience them as never intended, not in candlelit glimpses but in close-up stares. Ornate objects such as a solid-gold Neapolitan monstrance of 1746, Antonio de Laurentiis’s throne of Eucharistic exposition of 1754, and a Neapolitan crucifix of gold and lapis lazuli of 1756 are just about too much to take in under the light of the Frick’s spare new special-exhibition space. The same goes for Robert Landry’s reliquary of the true cross (1628–29), containing at its center a fragment of Helena’s fourth-century find.

As an exhibition of holy objects, “To the Holy Sepulcher” ultimately tells us little about the liturgical role of these materials back in Jerusalem. As a display of European metalwork and textile design, however, the show connects us to relics of the European past as never before. This connection is not lost on the Franciscan custodians of these works, who rightly see American institutions such as the Frick as upholding the legacy of Christian Europe even in a post-Christian, post-European age. Today, these treasures speak to the resurrection of Western culture as much as the Resurrection from that Jerusalem tomb. In either context, they represent singular objects of faith.

1. “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” opened at the Frick Collection, New York, on October 2, 2025, and remains on view through January 5, 2026. The exhibition will also be seen at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (March 15–June 28, 2026.