Fairfield University, whose patron is the Jesuit cardinal and theologian St. Robert Bellarmine, is celebrating this year the 75th anniversary of its founding. Linda Wolk-Simon, the imaginative and energetic director of the University Art Museum, had an audacious dream—indeed, she readily admits, it was “quixotic”—to bring to Fairfield the magnificent marble bust of Bellarmine sculpted by the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

One problem was that the bust resides high in the apse of the Church of the Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus, in Rome. Another was that it had never left Rome and there were no immediate plans for it to do so (if the Italian government had any say in the matter—which it did).