Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
--Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
When contemplating the flaying of St. Bartholomew, one can be forgiven if pretzels don’t come immediately to mind. Yet in the Morgan Library’s spectacular exhibit, “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” the artist’s depiction of St. Bartholomew sports a border of interlinked pretzels with a line of crackers down one side. We’ll never know why: what the artist intended is lost to time.
