Book Review: Conclave, Robert Harris

Conclave (Robert Harris), though initially published in 2016, seems rather current given the recent election of Pope Leo as the first American Pope and the ongoing war of words between that institution and the current US Administration.

A Conclave is the gathering of Roman Catholic Cardinals to elect a new Pope upon the passing of the old. The Robert Harris book covers a 72-hour-period between the death of a fictional Pope and the election of a successor after eight rounds of balloting. 

The story is told from the perspective of the Dean of the College of Cardinals, an individual who, according to Wikipedia, is “first among equals.” This particular Dean is beset by doubts of religious adequacy and that colors his actions throughout. He is the person who is constitutionally tasked with assembling and managing the Conclave.

This is a deeply researched piece which provides the reader with great insight into the procedures and working of a Conclave, the geography and structure of the Vatican, the bureaucracy of the Vatican, the history of the Papacy, and facets of both Papal and Conclave constitutions.

We are introduced to a series of candidates for the Papal position, some willing, some unwilling, and the machineries utilized to advance their candidacies. One by one leading candidates are brought down to earth by revelations arising from the past and there is the constant battle between no one being without sin and the risks to the Papacy of things coming to the fore after an election. Our protagonist is constantly in a battle as to what is right for the church versus what is right for the lord (in some cases they are not the same thing). The Cardinals are exhorted to pray and understand that with fervent prayer the Lord’s will would be revealed; but sometimes hard politics trumps prayers.

Even though dealing with a weighty topic, the book is light on its feet. It moves along at a good clip except when it gets into the sequence of events around the multiple ballots. There are a series of plot twists, with the final one being especially unexpected. The Dean finally comes to terms with his demons. A good read.

Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s Earth Skin as inspiration for dress worn to Met Gala by Suleika Jouaud, wife of Jon Baptiste

One of the stops on our (my daughter Karen and me) recent transcontinental train journey was the city of Denver and, while there, we visited the Arts of Africa collection in the city’s Art Museum. The collection had some interesting pieces and I fell behind Karen as we traversed it. At some point I heard Karen engaged in conversation  with two other voices. When I caught up with her I found her in deep conversation with two museum employees and she took me aside to show me the artwork that they had been discussing. The piece was beautiful — shimmery, textural, colorful and with impressive folds. 

Karen viewing El Anatsui’s Rain has no Father (2008)
at the Denver Art Museum on May 17, 2026.

From a distance it appeared to be made from a fabric of some type but, as I got closer, I could see the discontinuities between the individual pieces. The material, Karen said, was bottle tops tied together into a sheet-like structure. Not only was it attractive, she said, but, according to the staffers, the wife of Jon Batiste (the Grammy-award-winning musician) had worn a dress inspired by the artist’s design to the most recent  Met Gala.

I was intrigued. I was totally unfamiliar with the artist and, similarly so, with Jon Batiste’s wife. Further, I had not seen the particular piece in the few pictures I had seen coming out of the Met GalaSome investigation  was in order.

The Met Gala
The theme for the Met Gala Spring 2026 exhibition was  Costume as Art. The magazine Marie Claire identified some outfits worn that evening as resembling or drawing inspiration from iconic art works.  Among these, according to the magazine, was Suleika Jaouad in Christian Soriano inspired by Earth’s Skin by El Anatsui.

Left — Suleika Jaouad in Soriano, Right — Earth’s
 Skin (detail) by El Anatsui (Source:Marie Claire)

El Anatsui, Earth’s Skin

Who is Suleika Jaouad?
Suleika is described as a “writer, advocate and international speaker” who had developed Leukemia by the age of 22 and “documented her odyssey of illness, healing, and self-discovery in the New York Times Best Seller Between Two Kingdoms.” A fuller description of Suleika and her accomplishments can be found on her self-titled website. 

Who is El Anatsui?

The colossal, tactile artworks of contemporary Ghanaian artist El Anatsui have a ghostly, liminal quality that is impossible to pin down, hovering somewhere between sculpture, woven textile, and installation. Made from salvaged scraps of plastic, wood, and, most recently shiny metal, his suspended structures perform the challenging trick of turning discarded scraps into treasure; whether rippling against a flat wall or hung mid-air, the glittering, sensitively rendered surfaces he creates are great teeming masses of energy and life, filling the spaces they occupy with a commanding physical presence, while speaking of quiet, abstract narratives related to his African heritage and its place in the world today (blog.fabricstore.com).

El Anatsui was born and grew up in Ghana. He studied sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University and gained a teaching appointment at the Sculpture Department at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Given the paucity of sculptural source material in the area of the University, El Anatsui encouraged his students to look at their own surroundings for subject matter. He practiced what he preached focusing his practices in African themes and traditions.

Some of his earliest found-object works were from driftwood found on a beach in Denmark while he was doing a residency there. He subsequently created works using milk-bottle lids, cassava graters and foil bottle tops. He discovered that cutting the bottle tops up and binding them together with copper wire gave him source material that was pliable and portable and allowed flexibility in the creation of finished pieces. Sculptures made from the material had a “densely layered and richly tactile hand-made quality.

El Anatsui’s works can be found amongst some of the most prestigious art collections in the world including permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum; the Vatican Museum and many more. In 2023 he was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission by Tate Modern (elanatsui.com).

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In re the Met Gala, Marie stated thusly: “The outfits that shone brightest, however, were those that felt loosely spectacular — bold silhouettes, creative craftsmanship and looks that could genuinely be counted as costume.”

Book Review: Culpability, Bruce Holsinger

Really good read. The name should actually be “Shifting Culpability” given the frequency with which “responsibility/fault” flips between the cast of characters. Has an “I did not see that coming” kind of an end.

The book explores navigating the power dynamics in a marriage where the husband is plodding along in a safe, unspectacular job while the wife is a world-class, in-demand technology superstar with controlled mental issues and how they react when their lives are upended by an accident that should not have happened, includes their children, and results in the death of others.

This books treatment of artificial intelligence — its adoption, as well as the moral and ethical implications surrounding its use — is especially relevant given the issues that we as a society are confronting today.

Ethics and technology are key threads linking a series of events where responsibility/ownership keeps shifting between the players. Everything “works out” in the end but, given the prominence of ethics and morality in the book, it leaves a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth.

A quick read given text size, spacing, and the author’s knack for keeping the reader engaged. I heartily recommend this book.

Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit

Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit resides at Milan's Biblioteca Ambrosiana, its home since its acquisition by the Cardinal and his donation of his holdings in 1618. The piece was likely acquired directly from the Lombard painter by the Cardinal based on the intercession of one of Caravaggio's patrons.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit,
1597-1600 (Biblioteca Ambrosiano, Milan; viewed
in situ, 4/17/26)

There is a lack of consensus as to the painting’s actual date. The home institution dates it to between 1597 and 1600 while Spine claims 1596 and Pugliosi 1601. Jannick (Caravaggio’s Fruit … short.purdue.edu, 2010) sides with the 1601 date because “The fruit baskets in both Summer at Emmaus and Still Life with a Basket of Fruit are the same, perched precariously on the edge of a table, but with a different collection of fruit. … I suggest that this may have been (either) a preparatory painting for the larger Supper at Emmaus …”

In the absence of any earth-shattering, contravening information, I will go with the date stipulated by the organization which should, arguably, know more about the painting than anyone else.

The painting showcases a selection of fresh and withered fruit and leaves that gradually dessicate, all held within the confines of a wicker basket. Atypical of the paintings that came to characterize the Lombard painter, this piece does not exhibit the sharp delineation between light and dark. The contrast here is, rather, between the colorful fruit in the foreground and the unadorned, neutral background.

This painting has been characterized as exhibiting both "great realism" and attention to detail. The leaves, for example, summarize the life cycle (caravaggio.org):

• Still reaching towards the sun on the upper left
• Drooping on the lower left; and
• Withering and dying on the right.

Jannick verbally describes the detail that has been presented in the painting and I have illustrated it graphically in the below chart.

According to Poter (Michelangelo Merisi, Basket of Fruit, Emerging Infectious Diseases 2003 Dec 9(12)1663 - 64), "... the basket comments on the complexity and vanity of nature. Defying the moment of creation, the diverse image spans instead the life of the fruit, commenting on its inevitable decay. The blemishes, intentional and central to the theme, are not brought on by precipitous mishap but by nature. Uncontrolled environment (temperature, moisture, organisms) has disrupted the fruit's normal physiology, devitalizing the skin, allowing intrusion of pathogens, and promoting decomposition."

First Caravaggio stay in Naples and The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607)

Caravaggio arrived in Naples in September 1606 after hiding out in the Alban Hills to escape facing justice for the murder of Rannuccio Tommasoni. 

Naples was, at this time -- according to our guide -- the Vice-Capital to the King of Spain and everyone in the Court wanted to have a small house there. Also, in this timeframe, first-born sons would be given castles while second-born sons had churches built for them in the city. Naples thus became the "City of a Thousand Churches" and the most inhabited city outside of Paris. It was a relatively small city and many of its inhabitants were very poor. This concentration forced many of the poor to live in the streets and near the multitude of arches in the city. So Naples was, on the one hand, a place where you came to show off your wealth and, on the other, a reality of how destitute an individual could be. Crime was rampant, prostitution a constant, and a lack of clothing endemic.

In 1602, 12 members of the privileged class got together and founded the Misericordia to relieve some of the misery of the City's poor. They gained permission from the Church to build out the structure and manage incoming funds. The deal between the Fathers and the Founders remained secret for 200 years.

Pio Monte della Misericordia Founders

Bernardo de' Dominici, often referred to as the Neapolitan Vasari (because of his similar treatment of the lives of Neapolitan painters) stated that "... Caravaggio came to Naples where he was received with great acclaim by both artists and lovers of art painting, and he painted many works there."

The first of these was The Seven Acts of Mercy, painted between September 23, 1606 and January 7, 1607, for the then enormous sum of 400 ducats. The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy are (https://media.benedictine.edu/):

1. Feed the hungry
2. Give drink to the thirsty
3. Clothe the naked
4. Shelter the homeless
5. Visit the sick
6. Visit the imprisoned
7. Bury the dead.

According to caravaggio.org, the terms of the agreement stipulated that both the Madonna of the Misericordia and the Acts of Mercy had to occupy a single canvas. Historically each Act had been represented separately. 

Twenty years after the painting was installed, Board Members of the Misericordia signed a document prohibiting the sale or movement of the artwork from its emplacement. If I wanted to see this painting, then, I would have to travel to Naples. That I did with my friends Brandon and Lidia.

We had spent the prior day pursuing Caravaggio through the halls of the Capitoline Museums and the Doria Pamphilj Gallery. Now, on the morning after, we took a train from Rome to Naples. This was a significant trip because I had written about Caravaggio's work up to his stay in the Alban Hills but could not proceed beyond that until I had seen the next phase of his work -- Naples. Because I wanted to get the flavor of Naples, we enlisted in a 3-hour guided tour which would include art emplacements as well as locations which Caravaggio would have frequented while he was in the city.

Our tour as scheduled to begin at 10:00 am . We got into town early enough for a leisurely walk to the Misericordia, the starting point of the tour.

Brandon at Pio Monte della Misericordia

We went into the cafeteria situated below the offices of the Misericordia in order to have a pre-tour breakfast. While having our breakfast, the tour guide contacted me by phone to ask where we were. She asked us to remain there as that was actually the real starting point and she would bring the other members of the tour over there.

Brandon and the Author breakfasting at the cafe at 
Pio Monte della Misericordia

Lidia, Brandon, and the Author at Pio 
Monte della Misericordia

The Tour Guide showed up with two other team members and we were eventually joined by another couple. Before we began the walking part of the tour, we were subjected to a fairly lengthy discourse on the life of Caravaggio up to this Naples stint and given her perspective on the intent and meaning of his art. The image of Caravaggio coming out of that dialogue was of a barely understood man whose paintings told the "real truths" and whose character had been assassinated by biographers with axes to grind.

We then walked into the church to view the painting. It was breathtaking in its magnificence.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio,
The Seven Acts of Mercy, 1607
(Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples;
viewed in situ, 4/19/2026)

And then the tour guide began to explain the iconography as she saw it. Her explanations are graphically illustrated in the chart below.

Visual-arts-cork.com sees Caravaggio's church paintings of what they call "the first Neapolitan period," as being still linked stylistically with the paintings from the Roman years. As it relates to The Seven Acts of Mercy, the publication sees this piece as recalling "the S. Luigi dei Francesi scenes of St Matthew."

After the conclusion of the visit to the Misericordia, we walked to an eatery that Caravaggio frequented while he was in Naples and then to the Galleria di Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano to view Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610). But those are stories for another day.

I could not end without remarking on the excellent job done by our Tour Guide who exhibited a depth of knowledge of Caravaggio and his works that I was envious of. Not only was she knowledgeable, though, she did a great job of sharing said knowledge with others. The specific tour is named Naples: Masterpieces of Caravaggio Guided Walking Tour and it is offered by Get Your Guide.

In search of Caravaggio: Milan

I left the house while everyone was still sleeping on the morning of our travel day away from Burgundy and the fun of celebrating Brian’s 50th. I journeyed out onto the Italian Peninsula in my continuing quest to learn more about Caravaggio and his works. I was also aware of a number of exhibitions running in selected Italian cities and, if the occasion presented itself, I would visit a few of those.

I started out by taking a 6:10 am train from Beaune (Burgundy) to Milan by way of Lyon Part-Dieu. The total trip duration was 5 hours, 18 minutes, including a 40-minute change-of-train in Lyon.

In Milan I first went to Pinacoteca Ambrosiana where i was able to see Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit.

Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio) Basket of Fruit,
c. 1599

While at the museum I was able to see a number of other works to include Raphael’s Cartoon for the School of Athens fresco and a number of works by Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), including Mary Magdalene, and Sandro Botticelli’s The Madonna of the Pavilion.

Raphael, Cartoon for School of Athens fresco, 
1508 - 1509

Sandro Botticelli, The Madonna of the
Pavilion, 1510

Tiziano Vecellio, Mary Magdalene, 1575

Tiziano Vecellio, The Adoration of the Magi, 
1559 - 1560

Tiziano Vecellio, Man in Armour, c. 1530

I walked from Pinacoteca Ambrosiana to Palazzo Reale where an Anselm Kiefwr exhibition titled The Alchemists was running.

The exhibition features large-scale works honoring the memory of “…women whose memory were erased from history. Living primarily between the Midde Ages and the late seventeenth century, these alchemists were guardians of ancient forms of knowledge connected to nature, fire, earth, and the cycles of life.” A few of these works are shown below.

It had been a long day. I pulled up to Signor vino wine bar behind the Duomo and called it a day.

I would resume the quest on the following day.

The Barrington-Edwards-Retemeyer Lenten Journey

My nephews (Al and Devawn) and I spend a fair amount of time investigating the contents of wine bottles. Our favorite locale for this pastime is Vineyard Wine Company in Heathrow's Colonial Town Plaza. A little over a month ago, we were fully engaged when Dev dropped a bombshell. The Lenten season was fast approaching and he wanted to do a meaningful abstention over the period to honor the Lord's sacrifice. I thought that was honorable; and said so. I was very encouraging. That is, until he mentioned what was on his mind. He proposed giving up wine for the 40 days that comprised Lent. I thought, he surely had to be kidding. Such an action would have impacts far beyond him. Why should Al and I have to give up our sloshy lunches for 40 days just because he wanted to be Holy. We were not signing up for this yet we were being punished. This could not be the path forward. Drastic measures were called for.

After some reflection I offered him another path which, I thought, would allow him to sacrifice something (else) while retaining our family bonding activities. I told him that I would enlist family members to join him in a daily early morning (5:00 am) prayer session on Zoom for the duration of the Lenten season. He would be sacrificing sleep at the sweetest part of the cycle but, in addition, he would be accompanied on this journey by an-as-yet-to-be-determined number of family members. He thought about it and then nodded affirmatively. Waves of relief flooded over Al and I. We had dodged a bullet.

I went home and crafted an announcement on our family chat line. My Mom and youngest sister are both ordained Ministers so I knew that the Lord would not allow them to pass on this opportunity. Devawn had to show because this was an attempt to "rescue" him. Al of course had to show because ... My cousin Jenny in Virginia would also show because she does not miss an opportunity to compensate for living so far away from us. 

I got a few acknowledgments but people were not breaking down the doors trying to get in. A day or two before we were set to launch  Dev called me up and said that folks would be a lot more enthusiastic if I started at 6:00 am rather than 5. I thought that would be reducing the sacrificial quotient but I went along. I communicated that revised start time on the family chat line. Somewhere along the way he also communicated that he was going to be sacrificing the wine anyway. I was too far in. I had to move forward.

On the first morning we were eight strong. This included the folks I have mentioned plus my other two sisters and my brother-in-law Pat. I welcomed everyone, thanked them for coming, and then laid out the meeting order. We were operating in a Basic Zoom Meeting Room so we had 40 minutes (I told them 30) for each session. I told them that my younger sister (Kim) would lead the sessions and that everyone would be expected to read a self-selected Bible passage and then follow with a prayer. With everyone on board, I turned the proceedings over to Kim. 

We actually completed the first meeting in 30 minutes which left us a little time to chit chat about personal/family matters. I was very surprised as my Mom and Sis are not known for their brevity when it comes to Church-related stuff. But Devawn goes to work early and, I guess, everyone wanted to ensure that he continued putting food on his family's table. Prior to closing out the session, Kim asked my Mom for a word-of-the-day. My Mom offered up "Committed" and related it to what we would all have to do/be in order for this exercise to be successful. And that became a practice, with my Mom issuing a word-of-the-day at the end of every session. The full list is presented below.

Words-of-the Day

And so it went over the next 40 days. We were businesslike in that we did not meet on weekends. I would open the Meeting Room at 5:58 and Grace would be sitting their patiently awaiting entry. On many a morning Hazel and Pat would be there also. Or they would join shortly after. Devawn was consistently late; and it was always the same excuse. He was up but fell asleep 5 minutes before the meeting started. The group did not play. If you were not there two minutes after the start time, someone was deputized to reach out and bring you back into the fold. I messed up one day and did a Devawn and so they had to sub my sister's room and start without me. When they finally woke me up and patched me in, my Mom asked if I had been taught how to set the alarm on these new iPhones. Ouch. When I tried to ditch one meeting because of an early flight out, she chastised me that it was like inviting people into your home and then running off leaving them uncomfortably sitting in your space.

These sessions were inspirational and bond-reaffirming. We tightened our bonds both spiritually and as a family unit. Karen joined us in the final week. We prayed for each other's health and success and used the few minutes after the end of the session  to laugh and jest and revel in the glow of famil-iality. And, of course, Mom did not miss the opportunity to point out actions that could be taken to positively impact family outcomes and upcoming events.

We concluded the meetings with our last session on Good Friday. I had us meet in a Pro Room for this session so that Mom's time would be less constrained. Everyone mentioned how impactful these sessions had been and how elevating for their lives. They had grown from questioning participants to full-throated advocates. The love flowed freely.