Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Riccardo Tisci, Statuary Vestment for the Madonna Delle Grazie, on view in “Heavenly Bodies” at the Met Fifth Avenue, European Gallery. Spanning 60,000 square feet in 25 galleries over the two museum locations, “Heavenly Bodies” is also the Met’s largest exhibition, spatially, of all time. But there’s also a more practical reason for the show’s attendance success. The exhibition’s potent mix of fashion from the likes of Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Versace with real Papal treasures from Vatican City was boosted by press coverage of the Costume Institute’s star-studded Met Gala, which saw Rihanna dress as a sexy pope. Now that the visitor totals have been tallied for the exhibition’s full run, it has officially surpassed attendance figures for the museums’ second most-popular show, 1963’s “Mona Lisa,” and its all-time number one, “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which welcomed 1,360,957 guests back in 1978. At that point, it had already become the most-attended Costume Institute show of all time, and had eclipsed attendance numbers for the hit 1983 show “The Vatican Collections,” previously the third-most visited show in Met history. The astronomical number doesn’t come as too much of a surprise: In August, the museum announced that the show had just hit the 1 million visitor threshold. An astounding 1,659,647 visitors made the pilgrimage to the Met Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters to see the show during its run between May 10 and October 8, breaking a 40-year record. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has crunched the numbers and found that its Costume Institute blockbuster “ Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which closed earlier this week, is officially the museum’s most popular exhibition of all time.
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