I sympathize with our unhappy customer. But, though I’m not a Christian, I adore the Jesus pictures. Pacing these galleries is like paging through a family photo album of a grim but exceptionally intimate kind. There are the baby pictures: Adorations, Holy Familys, Virgin and Childs. There are moments of transition in a young man’s life: Baptisms,

If you or I were to build a machine, we’d go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn’t work that way at all. It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives.

With experience I’m coming to know that some works of art reward long looking while others give back less, and you often can’t guess at the outset which will be which.

Unlike this businessman, unlike most people, I have no ball to push forward, no project to advance, no future I am building toward. I could work at this job for thirty years and I will make no progress, per se. The public will gain no surer sense of where the mummies or the toilets are. They’ll continue to ask me for King Tut’s tomb, and they won’t

high-altitude archaeologist Constanza Cerruti,

And, indeed, the atmosphere in the galleries was intensely familiar, though for reasons that had nothing to do with plaid skirts or severe nuns. It was the atmosphere of all those months at Tom’s bedside, one of speechless mystery, beauty, and pain.

From a distance, I make out the powerful features of Idia, queen mother of the kingdom of Benin, on a mask made from a thin slice of elephant tusk. Idia raised an army to help her son, Esigie, win the throne and another army to expand his kingdom northward. The mask of her indomitable face is a particular type of artwork: one that makes a forceful

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge. I step up to a landscape painting called Vétheuil in Summer, close enough that it swallows my field of vision. I find

This was a sacred space, and it came with its own sacred version of time. Djet it was called, the time of the gods and the time of the dead, the time that governs what is complete, unchanging, perfect, and everlasting. Unlike either the circle or the arrow, djet stands apart from nature and her ever-fluctuating processes. It is the time of