Saintly.(The Talk of the Town)(painting of St. Dominic)

Earlier this spring, Mary Carter, a professor of art education at Ball State University, in Indiana, came to New York for a conference. During a break in her schedule, she visited the Met with a friend. Carter is partial to the Renaissance, so they headed directly for the European collection on the second floor, where a helpful docent joined them. He shared a few stories about the museum's costly purchase, in 2005, of the Duccio di Buoninsegna's "Madonna and Child," and then, as they stopped to look at a fifteenth-century Venetian painting of a monk, he leaned in and asked, suggestively, "Don't you think that looks like Rudolph Giuliani?"

"Gosh, that's uncanny," Carter replied. Giuliani, as it happens, had just been campaigning in Indiana. "It was as if someone had Photoshopped Giuliani, but fixed it so the Byzantine conventions were right," she said. "It was there in the eyes and the mouth. They were exactly him."

The monk in the painting, by Carlo Crivelli, is St. Dominic, the patron saint of astronomers. He is robed, and clasps a holy book in his left hand and holds a white lily (purity, to an iconographer) in his right. ("I bet his hands even look like that," Carter said of Giuliani.) He is mostly bald, and, instead of the old Giuliani comb-over, wears a tonsure, with a tuft of hair at the front of his forehead. His heavy-lidded gaze would not easily be confused with that of the stoic Giuliani of September 11th, say, or that of the sardonic Giuliani who faced down squeegee men and ferret owners, but possibly--and it's a stretch--that of the forlorn Giuliani of divorce proceedings and the Bernie Kerik saga.

"It looks like he's getting ready to call on a reporter at a press conference," Carter said. "The corners of his mouth go down. His eyes have kind of bags--they're droopy eyes. Giuliani, when he's not smiling, he looks like a tired guy." She granted that the nose ...