When our Parisian friend Isabelle asked which part of the Louvre I wanted to look at first, I responded like a cretin, an infidel, and told her the nineteenth-century French painters: the equivalent, I suppose, were someone to come to my country and ask to be taken to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown. But we went there, navigating through the maze of art, and it was wonderful. There’s an intoxicating emotional impact, a compressed intensity, in viewing great paintings by the masters in a smaller gallery—the greatest hits, for example, in the hushed intimacy of a museum like the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC—but I had never before experienced anything like the quantitative intensity of the Louvre: the steady scrolling, in room after room, wall after wall, painting after painting, of history, seemingly stroke by stroke.

Photo: Al Ianni

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