Table Talk
THIS PAST April I was supposed to be in London, where I was looking forward to seeing the Artemisia show at the National Gallery, the overdue vindication of a great Baroque painter. I had only ever seen glimpses of her work in person, particularly the wonderful Judith Beheading Holofernes in Naples—a painting that I now think is even better, more psychologically astute, than the famous Caravaggio picture of the same subject, even as I think that generally no artist surpasses Caravaggio for psychological insight. But the epidemic intervened, and what I had desired was forced to remain desire unfulfilled, floating free, disembodied, unconsummated, the blessed almost, something I’ve come to think may be the best thing that can happen to these longings. Instead, I ordered the catalogue of the exhibition and have spent happy hours turning the pages, which, I’ll have to confess, has always been my preferred way of seeing art: at a remove, with this subtraction of the real thing, a void filled by the inherent desire to see it, strangely satisfied by seeing it merely reproduced, an avatar of itself. I can rarely stand in front of a great painting and feel entirely that I am in its presence. Only in the recollection does the painting then become itself, the real thing, once it is no longer here.
The way I became something of a comical connoisseur of these pleasures of missing out took place some years ago in Verona. Flipping through a guidebook, I learned that not very far away, at Sirmione on Lake Garda, the ruined villa of Catullus stood. I couldn’t believe it. I loved the poet but had never heard, or else had forgotten, that his house could be seen. Immediately we looked at the map, decided on a plan, and departed. It looked easy. We would take a train to Peschiera, from whence we would walk along the waterfront to Sirmione and the villa. This turned out to be less straightforward than it seemed on the map. We arrived in Peschiera in the afternoon and could see the faint, mirage-like glow of Sirmione in the distance as we made our way toward it; but the shore
