Detail of St. Agnes, St. Bartholomew, and St. Cecilia, by the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altar, c. 1470-1510. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Portrait of the Artist as a Frog

John Derbyshire of National Review Online's blog The Corner, comments on an interesting piece of trivia touching on religious art, political cartoons and fellow Whapster Dan's favorite hangout in the Big Apple, the Latin Mass indult parish of St. Agnes, whose classically-inspired church went up only a few years ago as another example of the growing wave of new traditional architecture:

In re Sean Delonas [New York Post political cartoonist], I got this rather surprising e-mail from a reader: "Derb--I sat across from Sean Delonas's office for four years at the NY Post and I can confirm he is one of the nicest guys you would ever want to meet. Very few people know that he painted the altar mural at the rebuilt Church of St. Agnes on W. 43rd Street in Manhattan. I recall going to Mass there in the late 1990's and he would be up there, like Charlton Heston in The Agony and Ecstasy, painting during the service. I went up to him after Mass once while he wasn't looking and asked, 'When will you make an end?' Without missing a beat, he turned and said, 'When I'm finished.'

"Actually, a number of the 'saints' on the wall are actually NY Post editors and reporters. Would love to point them out to you sometime."

Here's more, from a February 16, 1998, column from the New York Metro.com's Intelligencer:

The public may rank journalists down there with lawyers and politicians these days, but the editors at the New York Post are saints as far as Sean Delonas is concerned. “Page Six” cartoonist Delonas, who recently finished painting a triptych for Saint Agnes Church on East 43rd Street, followed the tradition of his Renaissance predecessors, finding models for his saints among friends and acquaintances. Saint Ignatius, for example, bears an uncanny likeness to Post editor Ken Chandler. “There is some resemblance,” says Chandler. “But unlike me, the guy in the picture has no gray hair, and he’s about 30 pounds thinner.” Some even see Post music critic (and Delonas officemate) Dan Aquilante in the face of Saint Augustine, and Saint Christopher is a dead ringer for the paper’s managing editor, Joe Robinowitz. Standing before his masterpiece, Delonas refused to disclose all his sources of inspiration, although he did point out his wife, Judi (Saint Felicity), and his son, Ryan (the cherub pulling on Saint Nick’s gown). “Actually, I also put myself in,” Delonas added, pointing to the frog below Saint Christopher.

It could be worse: one of the Victorian age's great eccentrics, the 'spoiled priest' Frederick "Fr." Rolfe (otherwise known as Baron Corvo), painted a tryptych of the interment of St. Hugh in which every face, hundreds of them, were his own. Michelangelo himself (speaking of The Agony and the Ecstasy) legendarily painted his own face on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, and many a girlfriend, mistress, or (rarely) wife has been transformed into Mary Magdalene or the Madonna. Even nutty Adolf Wölfli portrayed himself as the (self-canonized) St. Adolf in his notebooks.

Delonas's far better mural, and the church itself, are surprisingly wonderful, a bold contrast of bright Van Eyck colors and Renaissance realism. The church itself is a hybrid of Florentine restraint in its cool whites and greys, but remains Roman and Counter-Reformation in form. I saw it myself on a spring break trip to Gotham a year ago, on the famous (infamous?) "sixty churches in seven days" tour that also included eating pizza in a deconsecrated Pentecostal meeting house and meeting George Rutler.

On a stranger note, that week I was approached randomly by a girl at Columbia, asked if I was an architecture student, and then asked which school in the country was the best, since her sister was looking for a degree. I told her Notre Dame, of course. Contrary to popular rumor, I did not attempt to secure a date with her.