When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found. It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily

She described a botched suicide attempt sparked by despondency after the death of her mother and “a number of private troubles, into which I would rather not enter.” She said she deliberately drove her car toward a quarry; in the resulting accident, she hit her head on the steering wheel and lost her memory;