Out of habit, Morgan reached for his alpha pager to check for messages. But then he remembered his resolution. There would be time to think of Miss Burns, of Scotland, of the inestimable Mr. Gordian, he reminded himself. For now, his mind must be clear; he must prepare himself for the Italian. He settled back against the thick leather seat, listening as the tenor warmed up to Verdi’s “Brindisi” in the opening act of La Traviata.

On April 26, 1937, aircraft belonging to Nazi Germany destroyed the city of Guernica, Spain. They acted on behalf of General Francisco Franco and the right-wing Nationalists, fighting in a war that would eventually claim the lives of at least one million people, many of them civilians. The target’s status as a holy city for the Basque people was the sole reason for the attack; the length of the raid and the fact that civilians were hunted down by the attacking aircraft gives the lie to any claim that this was anything other that a deliberate massacre designed to both intimidate and desecrate. For three hours, the German Luftwaffe dropped incendiary devices and explosives, strafed women and children who had run into nearby fields, and otherwise worked hard to obliterate every trace of life in the town. In an ugly era, it was a particularly ugly deed.

And yet, strange, dark beauty blossomed from it. In January 1937, Pablo Picasso received a commission from the Spanish Republican government: a painting to occupy one wall of the Spanish pavilion at Paris’s Universal Exposition scheduled for later that year. He had struggled with what to portray. On April 30th, he saw photographs of the German attack at Guernica in the evening newspaper Ce Soir. The photographs provoked one of the twentieth century’s most important works, a monument to man’s inhumanity and at the same time a testimony to the power of art—Guernica.

The construction of the painting was documented by Dora Maar, whose photographs reveal the various permutations and stages it underwent as the master created. These helped it become not only one of the most famous large-scale paintings of the twentieth century, but also one of the most studied.

More obscure, indeed for all practical purposes unknown, were fourteen small works intended—perhaps—as companion pieces in the exhibit. Each elaborated in a different way on elements of the masterwork—the bull, the lantern, the warrior, the dead child. And each related, in ways at times obscure and at other times obvious, to the Catholic Stations of the Cross—of which there are also fourteen.