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Abstract Essay in its Fifth season, featuring Lori Joan Swick a Ph.D. in religion and philosophy as my guest.
Description
One Woman’s Sacrifice. One Man’s Undoing.
Daughter to an ancient Roman senator, Cecilia is forced into a lonely marriage to a loathsome patrician and leaves behind her infatuation for the handsome Sebastian of Milan. With her husband often away on military duty, however, Cecilia seeks refuge through her clandestine meetings with a Christian congregation hiding in the catacombs beneath the Appian Way. When news of Sebastian's torture brings her to his aid and her involvement with Sebastian and the Christians is exposed, Cecilia must face fatal consequences.
Thirteen hundred years after her death, Saint Cecilia’s body is exhumed from her grave and young artist Stefano Maderno is commissioned by the pope to sculpt her likeness. Seeking a big break in his career, Stefano enthralls himself in his work and the romanticized accounts of Cecilia’s virginity and martyrdom. However, the more he immerses himself in carving her form, the more he struggles against his sinful nature to be worthy of his subject’s virtue. Stefano’s dedication to Cecilia’s legacy might just be what breaks him.
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