Word has come down in the news media that Sancta Maria in Ripa has been put on the market for sale by the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Lemay. I’ve looked at the majestic buildings twice, first in October of 2008, and then in December of 2020. The high school buildings are not for…
Tag: Sculpture
Epiphany Lutheran Church
I’ve become intrigued recently with the sculpting and shaping of wood in churches in St. Louis. Marble is always beautiful, and is the inheritance of the Greeks and Romans, who, living around the Mediterranean and its more volcanically active geologic topology, had access to metamorphic stone. But in the transalpine regions of Europe in places…
Interior, St. Mary’s of the Barrens, Perryville
The interior of St. Mary of the Barrens can easily rank as one of the most beautiful church interiors in the United States, and I’ve seen a lot of churches in my life. If you don’t remember my post on Il Gesù from back in November, go back and read it, and then come back…
Courthouse Square, Perryville
We’ll start our tour of Perryville in the courthouse square, with the Perry County Courthouse, constructed in 1904. The architects were Caldwell and Drake of Columbus, Indiana and the building cost approximately $32,000. It is on the National Register. And of course there’s a statue of a Union soldier in the lawn out in front….
Bellefontaine Cemetery, Snow in January 2025
I usually try and make it up to Bellefontaine Cemetery after it snows, and the roads were in great condition inside its gates, so I drove around and took a few photos.
Northern Reaches, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
Up near the northern fence line, we came across some of the oldest clusters of graves with a large number of limestone grave stones. We were very interested. We also saw some iconography we had never seen before, of a spirit floating over an opened gate, surely representing a soul passing through the gates of…
Obelisks, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
Let’s look at some obelisks, which go all the way back to Egyptian architecture and religion. You can read about their religious significance in ancient Egypt here. The Romans were famous for stealing Egyptian obelisks and setting them up in temples in Rome, particularly at the Iseum in the Campus Martius. This obelisk group of…
Monuments and Sculpture, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
What better way to celebrate the unseasonably warm weather the day after Christmas than to head to Bellefontaine Cemetery? So today and the three following days, we’ll look at four different themes of various sights we saw as we walked the grounds away from the roads. We saw old favorites and many new ones. Take…
St. Clare of Assisi Roman Catholic Church
The current church of St. Clare of Assisi dates from 1965, though the parish was formed several years before. The congregation used the chapel of the adjacent Passionists nuns, who still exist next door until its own church was built. As we have discussed lately, the church is similar to St. Martin de Porres in…
Muscatine, Iowa, Part Two
Downtown Muscatine was really nice, with most of the storefronts occupied and many buildings looking like they had recently been renovated. As would be expected, there are a plethora of Italianate storefronts, as one often sees in cities along the river. The Laurel Building, below, was built in 1917 and was designed by William Hyland…