Carved from a single slab of Carrara marble, the sculpture seems to give off a glow.

200 Years of Solitude

Giovanni Strazza’s The Veiled Virgin is considered among the world’s great sculptures. So why has it been sequestered inside a Newfoundland convent?

By John von Sothen

For many of us, Newfoundland is best known as a blotch of green on a transatlantic-flight map, reaching out from North America like a fist whose pinky reads, “St. John’s.”

This sparsely populated region of Canada, where majestic cliffs plunge into orca- and iceberg-filled waters, remains remote and mysterious even more than 1,000 years after the Norse explorer Leif Erickson landed there.