It took him four days in March to spend the first sum, while he enjoyed the "Kingdom of Netherlands." According to the form, he was a guest at Holland's "official celebration of their 400 year relationship with New York." Awkward!

He spent the next bundle during five November days in Izmir, Turkey, where he was doing more wooing than celebrating. According to the form, he spent his time trying "to develop sister-city status."

There's no figure attached to Mr. Markowitz's 2008 trip to Israel. But the intent, apparently, was honorable: "to honor Brooklyn's connection to Israel and reaffirm our support of its goals, as well as to promote tourism between Israel and Brooklyn—encouraging Israelis to visit Brooklyn just as we encourage Brooklyn travelers of every background to consider experiencing the beauty and rich history of Israel."

And at least he didn't misspell the country's name as "Isreal," as did City Councilman James Sanders Jr., who also conceded in disclosures that he "may be incorrect with the proper title of the group that paid for the trip."

Apparently, in these uncertain economic times, consulates and other foreign missions are sought-after office tenants, according to CBRE senior VP Matthew McBride in a statement about the Netherlands lease. Why? The foreign offices aren't as affected by the economic zigs and zags as private sector tenants.

Let's be clear: this is the ONLY THING anyone who loves sports cares about today. What will Materazzi admit to? What will Zidane say? Who will be believed? How will it all unfold? I can't wait.

This is bigger than the hand of god in '86. It's the tongue of god, and the head of god...

Fascinating to think that the Netherlands is now developing a reputation for nativism. As we learn today, Rita Verdonk's fussiness over another darkskinned applicant may help to have brought down the Dutch government. I wonder whether the Netherlands' humiliation in the World Cup did not play a part too.

(P.S. I should add that Greg McNair is a person of color himself...)

Today the immigration case has threatened to bring down the Dutch government. And the Canadian Press reports that the former Muslim is headed to...

Wow. Smart readers.

My response: O.K. Yes; I was agreeing with Kissinger. Obviously, I'm wrong, in some large measure. Culture is a significant factor in soccer performance. Saying "minorities" is pretty offensive. And I call myself an internationalist...

But to rally to my side for a second: There is a widespread equation in mainstream American culture of athleticism and blackness. C.f., Jayson "White Chocolate" Williams on the Heat, the movie, White Men Can't Jump, and Larry Summers's fatal, and scientistic, musings about innate abilities of a year ago ("the data will, I am confident, reveal that... white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association."). Isn't it true that, right now in America, basketball and football are dominated by black athletes, in part because they are faster and jump higher? And that if we want to perform in soccer, we have to get some of those guys on the team? What say you, John?

That's how they do it in the Netherlands, to the delight of right-thinking beings who see the Dutch branch of Murder Inc. as a force for better living through homicide. And perhaps that is how they will do it everywhere some day soon, when the Western world formally puts aside its Judeo-Christian traditions in favor of science and progress.

As we've been reminded these last few days, John Paul II helped bring down the Berlin Wall through the power of his moral authority. But even this formidable man was unable to dismantle the pillars and flying buttresses which support the Western world's Church of Everlasting Consumption, where children are euthanized, not baptized, and the only sin is a belief in sin itself. He argued and hectored and warned, but to no avail. This champion of liberty was unable to free us from the ceaseless dictates of consumerism and the fateful snares of what is called scientific progress.

In the televised obsequies over the weekend, John Paul invariably was described as "beloved," as surely he was. But in the traditional heart of Christianity and Roman Catholicism-Europe-those tender feelings weren't so heartfelt as to inspire millions to return to the churches they abandoned before and during the late pontificate. Those talking heads who compared the Pope's appeal to that of a rock star accidentally identified the cause of his failures. Like a rock star, the Pope was famous-a Polish Bono. But people do not order their lives in accordance with Bono's teachings (however much the Irish rocker might wish it). Nor, very likely, did many of the people who felt obliged to light a candle to John Paul's memory pay much heed to what the Pope said.

The Pope's triumphs in the East, justly celebrated as advances in human freedom, were not matched in the West, despite his best efforts. It is commonplace to note that Catholics no longer attend Mass in countries like Italy and France, and even in John Paul's beloved Poland and in stalwart Ireland, priests look out on huge gaps in the pews.

Critics in the secular media invariably suggest that this falling away from devotion is the inevitable result of the Pope's traditional teaching on abortion, divorce, gay marriage and birth control. While some or all of these issues surely alienated many Catholics, in fact they are but pieces of a larger and more complicated truth. These critics assume that had the Pope ordained women priests and revoked Humanae Vitae, Catholics would have returned to Mass and, rather than closing parishes in the U.S. the Vatican would be looking to build bigger churches. That is too simplistic. Aggressive secularism, a cult-like belief in the higher powers of science and rampant consumerism-the spirit of the times-proved to be the Pope's most determined antagonists in the battle for Western hearts and souls.

In 1979, John Paul II celebrated Mass in Yankee Stadium and used the occasion to admonish the very forces which so many believe animate this city. "Christians," he said in his homily, "will want to be in the vanguard in favoring ways of life that decisively break with the frenzy of consumerism, exhausting and joyless. It is not a question of slowing down progress, for there is no human progress when everything conspires to give full rein to the instincts of self-interest, sex and power. We must find a simple way of living."

Without the instincts of self-interest, sex and power, what is New York-or, more to the point, what is that rarefied sector of New York which speaks for a city of eight million? According to John Paul, what it is not is free. It is captive, hostage to a "joyless" ideology, empty of meaning.

When John Paul told the Poles and the other oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain to "be not afraid"-the exhortation of the risen Christ-they rose and cut loose their shackles. But when the Pope preached at Yankee Stadium against "the temptation to make money the principal means and indeed the very measure of human advancement," we in the West smiled and waved and went about our business. And so, like Marley's ghost, we have seen our chains grow link by link and yard by yard. We have found neither repose nor freedom in the unyielding demands of careerism, that bastard child of consumption and ambition.

John Paul couldn't go on speaking such things without a reaction from both the secular left and the free-market right, although it must be said that the former was more frothing than the latter. The secular left deemed him conservative and reactionary-never mind his positive citations, espoused in Laborem Exercens, of the "struggle for social justice." He was, in fact, more liberal than the Democratic Party in his demands for a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth and resources.

Informed, caring critics (this category would exclude the instant theologians among the pundit class) have it right when they say that the Pope wasn't helpful in building trust between the hierarchy and the flock. Priests and bishops and even the Pope himself are supposed to be servants of the servants of God. Under this Pope, however, the servants of God-the men and women in the pews-were handed their orders and their subscription fees and advised to keep their mouths shut. If the local bishop decides to close a church-like historic St. Brigid's in the East Village, a true landmark of American Catholicism-there will be no discussion. The bishop decides. Parishioners will please pay attention to the collection basket and refrain from asking questions.

This breakdown in dialogue-between bishops and the Pope, between bishops and an informed, educated laity-will haunt the Catholic Church for years. Happily, however, the work to which John Paul called Catholics is being done at the parish level, where involved laypeople are working cooperatively with priests in renewing this 2,000-year-old institution. I know priests and nuns who make a distinction between the institutional church, presided over by out-of-touch bishops, and the spiritual church, a holy place where all that matters is the work of the Lord.

That said, there's no denying that John Paul became an easy target not only for those who find Catholicism distasteful, but for those who find religion in all its manifestations to be evidence of backward values and stunted intellect-except, of course, for those rituals practiced in cultures deemed to be oppressed by the United States. The Papacy as an institution stands for what the technicians of the modern world oppose: a belief in the sanctity of human life; a suspicion of free-market capitalism operating according to its own morality, with no sense of social justice.

"For why is it that you put the blame on this Christian era, when things go wrong?" St. Augustine asked unbelievers in City of God. "Is it not because you are anxious to enjoy your vices without interference, and to wallow in your corruption, untroubled and unrebuked?" John Paul would not have put it so bluntly, but he, like Augustine, saw his role as a teacher and a prophet, searching for spiritual truths in a secular world.

Rooted in Scripture, John Paul would not have claimed to be flawless, or even great. Many Catholics did disagree with him profoundly. I am deeply concerned about some of the men he has raised to bishop in the United States, small-minded autocrats who seem to believe they can tell me how I should vote. I believe he was wrong to shepherd former Boston Archbishop Bernard Cardinal Law to Rome after he quit in disgrace, the chief organizer of the appalling cover-up of sexual abuse in the Church. I was disturbed by his squashing of dissent, and his moves to rein in Catholic universities, particularly in the United States.

Nevertheless, it was during his Papacy that I moved from the ranks of lapsed Catholics to those of practicing Catholics. It was, in part, because of his words that I have tried to live my life and raise a family according to the Catholic principles of social justice. I don't always live up to those principles, which makes me not a hypocrite but a sinner-a flaw I share with the Pope and the rest of humanity.

According to Catholic tradition, mercy awaits us sinners-not the perverted mercy of the Dutch doctor's needle, but authentic mercy, everlasting and undeserved.

John Paul lived his life in anticipation of mercy. Persuading us to live likewise, however, was an assignment that even he could not accomplish.

"Get comfortable talking about your faith," Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, the only Democrat in the South to be re-elected, recently told a party meeting called "The Road Back." The gathering, sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council, brought together a number of mournful party members looking for a way to break into the red states and get themselves some votes.

Ms. Lincoln's prescription for electoral success may make sense for Democratic politicians thirsting for office, but its unstated premise is one that should scare the bejesus out of any nonbeliever, if such a person is willing to so designate himself in a climate thick with assertions of the primacy of faith. Ms. Lincoln is saying, in effect, that if you don't have faith, you have no place in the public life of the nation.

What's being asked of the religiously nonaligned is more than the respectful, if somewhat insincere, doffing of the hat toward the faith of others. This is not about some goofy debate over taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance or complaining about the electric menorah in front of the public library. Nor is it about the bombastic, self-righteous imprecations uttered by an overly compensated licensed divine at a ribbon-cutting or the opening of the legislative day. Regardless of how antipathetical toward religion a person may be, if she is sane, she shrugs her shoulders and gets on with the day's agenda. What's going on here is intimidating people into uttering religious thoughts they do not mean and going along with the insertion of the religious interest and religious advantage into all and every aspect of public and institutional life.

The President and the federal government push religion and persons of faith (odious term) up and into every place they can. Corporations are making space available and sweetly pressuring their employees into religious groups. They used to say that you couldn't get ahead if you were fat, short, bald or any combination thereof. We are swiftly moving toward the moment when you will not be able to get ahead if you haven't demonstrated that you are religious.

Ms. Lincoln, whether she realizes it or not, is backing an informal but devastatingly effective religious test. The Republicans have had one going for some time, and now the Democrats are accepting a test of faith as what they must do to be competitive.

So let them go do it. Judging from the miserable time that John Kerry had not getting comfortable talking about his faith, the Democrats might think of going on the Internet to buy equipment to help them fit into red-state culture. There must be a Web site where you can buy a wrench for tightening your ass, and there should be Internet schools where formerly louche Democrats can learn the language of religious cant.

As the pietistical pose becomes the single stance in public life, brace yourself for the specially nauseating form of hypocrisy which is religious hypocrisy. The phony reverential attitude, the lowering of the eyes, the clasping of the hands in a way which denotes piety and pure living, the formulaic braying and the unarguable deference for any inanity so long as it comes from a religious source-it all follows. Perhaps the worst consequence which comes with elevating religion to a place of such importance is empowerment of the clergy.

The cost of destroying a secular public life will, if allowed to proceed, undermine the stability of American democracy. All these people on their knees holding candles may not appreciate it, but public religion, not private religious formation, is the enemy of our kind of government. Even in the long-past era when most Americans were some brand or other of Calvinist, religion had to be pushed into the corners of politics so that a nascent secular culture could nourish democracy. In the first half of the 19th century, the battle to drive religion out of the political forum and into the home was not easily nor ever entirely won. Waves of religious mania battered the country and threatened democratic institutions and practice. They still do.

The Christians and their churches, which are using their temporary, strategic, electoral-minority position to gain majority dominance, will live to wish that they hadn't labored so long to put "people of faith" in the driver's seat. Other than dogmatism and a built-in resistance to reason, logic and science, sectarian religions have nothing in common except a potential antagonism for each other-one which holds the threat of someday ripping the country to shreds. "Religion" and "faith" are pushing ahead on a common front now, but in due course they will fall on each other with mortal fury. History teaches that the one thing religions hate more than secularism is other religions. With each year that religions are encouraged and given a preferential place, they become more demanding and more truculent in claiming more power and deference. As more members of more religious organizations adopt peculiar and distinguishing forms of dress, headgear and hair, the lines harden and the probability of physical conflict between these groups of faith-based fanatics grows.

Intra-sectarian violence has already manifested itself in France and the Netherlands. In France, it has taken the form of Muslim anti-Semitism; in the Netherlands, the Muslims apparently started it, but the Christians have eagerly joined in. You would have thought that 15 years after the end of Communism and the resurgence of pre-Marxist religious antipathies and feuds, no democratic politician with his or her head screwed on right would encourage religionism, but the non-sectarian Republicans have been supporting and backing the religious fanatics in their ranks. Possibly some of the non-religious nuts in the party think that this upheaval in religion is a long-needed moral purgative, while at the same time believing that they can control these hopped-up evangelicals and use them for their own not-so-religious, profit-making purposes.

What possesses the Democrats to play this game is beyond understanding. Their lately-come-by piety is not going to fool anyone other than themselves. The Democratic Leadership Council types are saying that Bill Clinton is an example of a politician who was able to talk comfortably about his faith, to use Ms. Lincoln's phrase, but they're kidding themselves. The religious people took Mr. Clinton for the lying whoremaster he regrettably was and broke their backs trying to drive him out of office on morals charges. They almost did it, too. If the leaders of the Democratic Party hope that they can fool the holy people by buying themselves white leatherette-bound Bibles and pink plastic Jesuses and turning up to give testimony at church, they've got another thing coming. That is going to hoodwink the same number of people who can't see through it when liberals call themselves progressives. You know the old saying: "Just because he's crazy doesn't mean he's stupid." The same for religious nuts.

When you consider the background of so many people in the Democratic Party, it is bewildering that they would take the risk of encouraging what can so easily become communitarian/sectarian conflict. The parents and grandparents of many of them suffered from the hatreds and violence which sprang from allowing religion the kind of role that the evangelicals are demanding. Now their grandchildren are willing to risk a reprise?

Once the flames of sectarian conflict are ignited, it takes a thousand devils to stamp them out-and that is 999 devils more than the Democrats have at their command. Religion is absolutism, and absolutism goes to war with anything it abuts. Turn on the Christian television-cable is full of it-and listen to them denounce "humanistic relativism." What is relativism? It is moderation, it is accommodation, it is the rule of reason, it is acknowledgment of others who are different, it is a repudiation of dogmatics-but dogmatics are what religion is built on.

Given the history of this party, given thousands of its members in the past who have been the prime targets of faith-based hatred, Democrats will do better in every way to leave the dogmatics to the Republicans. There are worse things than being accused of humanistic relativism and a proclivity for the rule of reason. Who knows, the D's may be in for a surprise: On occasion, those who are true to themselves have been known to win an election.

He thus escaped the fate of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right-winger, who became a demon-worse than les boches and les américains -when he managed to qualify for the run-off in the French presidential election last month. The 73-year-old Mr. Le Pen, a perennial candidate, won a sixth of the vote in the first round, comparable to some other showings of his. But in a fractured field, this was enough to earn him a head-to-head shot at Jacques Chirac, the haggard and crooked incumbent. Eighty percent of the French electorate then did the right thing, and the far-right ogre went down to defeat.

The two politicians were in fact different. Mr. Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper, fought in France's last colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina and had whiffs of an even more unsavory past (he called the Holocaust a "detail of history"). In a tradition going back to Colbert, his economic ideas were dirigiste and nationalist. Fortuyn was in many respects a leftish libertarian: He wanted to cut taxes and spending, and he was on the edge of Dutch social innovation, favoring drug legalization and euthanasia. His open gayness completed the mix. He wanted to get paid, get laid, get high and die when he could no longer do the first three to his satisfaction.

What linked the two men was their opposition to sky-high immigration. Immigrants make up an estimated 10 percent of the population of Holland, and 45 percent of the population of Rotterdam is non-ethnic Dutch. Both Fortuyn and Mr. Le Pen also campaigned strongly on the related issue of crime. European crime rates, except for homicides, are often as high as, if not worse than ours, especially in urban ghettos-which, in Europe, are populated by immigrants.

European immigration is not an abstraction, nor is it (as it is in New York) a gorgeous mosaic-a phenomenon with so many faces that it's faceless. European

immigration has a local habitation and a name. The newcomers come from Turkey, or from across the lake of the Mediterranean. They are Middle Eastern Muslims. Mr. Le Pen stridently identifies them with what he sees as France's problem. Fortuyn was often more polite, but no less blunt. "I'm not anti-Muslim," he claimed the month before he died. "I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities. It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."

Turning Mr. Le Pen into a Nazi and Fortuyn into a Le Pen is a way for Europeans to fight and win yesterday's wars while ignoring today's problems. If Europe's pressing issue is the ghost of Hitler, still walking the battlements after 57 years, then a Frenchman or Dutchman can do what his father did (or didn't do) in World War II and fight that battle over again. But if Europe faces a new problem in the form of unassimilated Middle Eastern immigrants, then old slogans and modern pieties will not be the best way to deal with it.

Are European opponents of immigration typecasting an entire civilization? Why don't people from "rural Muslim cultures," as Fortuyn put it, assimilate there?

Some do, of course. Fortuyn had his own cadre of supporters of Middle Eastern ethnicity, often shopkeepers who did not want to be robbed and vandalized by criminal freeloaders in their own communities. If immigrants don't assimilate, then surely P.C. governments who do not make Frenchness or Dutchness the ticket to participation in their societies must bear a great share of the blame.

What problems do the immigrants bring with them? No one from the Middle East (with the limited exception of Turks) can say that he has lived in a free society. The sleep of freedom produces monsters. Middle Eastern dictatorships and kleptocracies are supported by European (and American) oil and arms deals; to that extent, the First World colludes in the Third World's bondage. Yet most of these regimes have arisen from local soil. It is hard to pull the puppet strings of foreign countries, as the Europeans learned when they were colonial powers, and as we have learned in our more recent imperial experience. (Where now is the Shah of Iran?) So the sheiks and kings, the secular brutes and the one-party army officers, are domestic products, and their survival is a symptom-like mildew in a wall-of underlying structural damage.

It's easy to laugh at the discomfiture of Europe. Certainly the Europeans have been smug pains in the butt during our half-century-long struggle with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Now that they have their own minorities, which do not even share their history and their religion, let them stew. In his recent book The Death of the West , Patrick Buchanan wrote that Europe will inevitably fall to the Middle Eastern invasion, because declining birthrates require its welfare states to import workers. Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, argues that as Europe becomes ever more fractious and bitter towards us, we will embrace our immigrants from Mexico and re-orient our civilization towards this hemisphere-a version of Oceania, the Anglo-American empire of George Orwell's 1984 , minus Airstrip One (i.e., Britain).

I feel more sympathetic toward Europe, if only out of self-interest. Several of the 9/11 hijackers were recruited or based in Germany. We don't want the continent to become a pirate's nest of murderers. We are, let us hope, gradually becoming serious about open borders and internal cultural Bantustans. We paid a heavy price for frivolity last fall. Maybe Europe will learn from our example.

Whether or not this is one of the reasons why large-scale exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance tapestries have been a rarity for as long as anyone can now remember-well, that's a question we can only speculate about. What is certain is that the greatest of these tapestries are indeed art on an epic scale, and major exhibitions of them remain a rarity. Even at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there hasn't been an exhibition of such tapestries since the 1974 show devoted to Masterpieces of Tapestry from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century , which, among its 97 tapestries, included two complete Unicorn series, both The Lady with the Unicorn from the Cluny Museum in Paris and The Hunt of the Unicorn from the Cloisters in New York.

Now, with the exhibition the Met has mounted in Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence , the museum has returned to the subject with a somewhat smaller but no less magnificent survey of these rarely seen masterworks. In the art world, it has unfortunately become commonplace to speak of this or that work of art or even entire exhibitions as "magnificent" when we may only mean that we have seen something rather striking or unusually interesting. But on this occasion, it isn't mere hyperbole for the museum to make a claim for magnificence in the very title of the exhibition. With its 41 tapestries, some of enormous size, from 33 collections in 12 countries, Tapestry in the Renaissance is itself an exhibition on an epic scale.

The focus is on the period 1420-1560 in the Netherlands, Italy and France, when the churches and royal courts of Western Europe were in a position to devote a considerable portion of their great wealth to an art that was deemed to be one of the essential measures of their authority and power. It was rarely, if ever, an art addressed to the masses. It was thus not, in our sense of the term, a public art. As the museum is at some pains to remind us, Renaissance tapestry was "the art form of kings" and their vast retinues of courtiers and dependents. It is only in modern times-and even then infrequently-that, owing to the emergence of the art museum as an institution of public culture, our own democratized societies have been given large-scale access to an art theretofore reserved for what we should now describe as a social and political elite.

With our entry into the very first room of this huge exhibition, we are confronted with a dauntingly unfamiliar spectacle: The Death of Troilus, Achilles and Paris , a late-15th-century tapestry measuring nearly 16 feet in height and 31 feet in width, and depicting a battle scene of almost unimaginable violence and complexity. Woven of wool and silk in the Netherlands circa 1475-1495, it encompasses such a multitude of individual figures, horses, flashing swords, flying banners and inscriptions in French and Latin verse-all embel-lished with brilliant color-that it takes a while even for an assiduous eye to identify the fallen heroes whose tragic fate gives this teeming narrative composition its principal themes. Even by Renaissance standards, The Death of Troilus, Achilles and Paris is an amazing feat of pictorial invention, and it is said to be but one example of what was originally a series of 11 tapestries depicting the story of the Trojan War.

More familiar to us is a single example from the Unicorn tapestries- The Unicorn Defends Itself , from the Met's own permanent collection. Although the Unicorn tapestries have a certain fairy-tale quality, the series was actually conceived as an allegory of the Passion of Christ, and this one fits into the current Met exhibition quite nicely, as the bulk of the tapestries selected for this show are indeed devoted to religious subjects.

Some of these, too, are of such a size and complexity that they can scarcely be seen in their entirety on a single viewing. When we revisit them, there are always new discoveries to be made. Take, for example, The Triumph of Lust , which exceeds 27 feet in width. It was designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, circa 1532-33, and woven in Brussels a decade later. It is so crowded with dramatic action, arcane symbolism, fantastic invention and decorative embellishment that the eye soon despairs at the task of encompassing more than a fraction of its teeming narrative. Basically a tableau of unfettered debauchery set in a more or less pastoral landscape, even the moral of this admonitory composition is not easily fathomed, for most of the many lovers depicted in this overscale picture appear to be having a very good time and not to be especially concerned about the punishments that await them in the next world.

Since this tapestry was part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, there can be no doubt about its didactic intention, and its very subject-the eternal conflict between the Vices and the Virtues-was an established convention in Christian art and literature long before the Renaissance. Yet to the modern eye, anyway, the pleasures to be derived from the triumph of lust are certainly given their due in this composition, and one cannot help but further wonder if their depiction on this scale may not have served as a further incitement for some of the sinners to which it was originally addressed. I mean no disrespect in observing that it's a very entertaining picture.

Moreover, one of the most interesting things about this Tapestry in the Renaissance exhibition is the public's response. On the first morning that I spent in the exhibition, visitors seemed absolutely transfixed by what they were seeing in the first two or three rooms of the show, and maintained a slow, thoughtful pace through the remainder of its 10 rooms. The study gallery, where visitors can sit down and consult the voluminous catalog of the show, was more crowded than I had ever before seen at the Met. They weren't just resting, either. They were reading, comparing notes, and clearly in a state of high excitement. It was all new to them, and they were enthusiastic-maybe a little bewildered, too. This was not something they had encountered in Art History 101; it was like nothing they had ever seen before. I felt pretty much the same way myself.

The only downside of the exhibition is that when you leave it and make your way down that long second-floor corridor adorned with a great many familiar 19th-century European paintings and sculptures, everything suddenly looks rather timid and paltry, in size and style as well as subject matter. We are plunged smack back into the unheroic era of bourgeois art, and the sense of loss-the loss of intensity, scale and grandeur-is deeply felt. It was like attempting to read prose after a protracted immersion in the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare.

Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence was organized by Thomas Campbell, associate curator in the Met's department of European sculpture and decorative arts and supervising curator of its Antonio Ratti Textile Center. Mr. Campbell is also the editor and principal author of the show's excellent catalog, which runs over 600 pages. Among much else, Tapestry in the Renaissance is an extraordinary curatorial and scholarly achievement, and it's a show I expect to return to many times before it closes at the Met on June 19.