“Cimabue and Duccio,” I said, thoughts of hiding the journal in the box of Duccio notes in my mind, still worrying someone might find it.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Just overwhelmed by the art,” I said, and I was. The medieval paintings had obviously been taken out of churches, some with ragged panel edges, others with frames that had clearly been part of something else. The word theft slipped into my mind, and I pictured my great-grandfather with the Mona Lisa hidden under his shirt.

Alexandra said she’d had enough of early Christianity and headed down the hall. I followed her to a room filled with paintings by the Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

“Amazing,” I said, struck by a mural-sized painting that I was trying to see over the heads of a Japanese tour group, the leader wearing a headset, the group of at least thirty also with headsets, which sounded like a field of crickets.

I dipped in front, and Alexandra followed.

“La Primavera,” I said.

“Spring,” she said.

“Botticelli embracing a pagan subject from ancient Greek and Roman mythology—Venus inviting us into her garden.”

“I’m in!” Alexandra said, and I thought she could easily slide into the painting, take her place beside the three Graces, and dance along with them. Her blond hair was down today, loose on her shoulders, an ideal subject for Botticelli.

“Is that Mars beside them?” she asked.

“No, that’s Mercury, god of spring, clearing the winter clouds away.”

Alexandra gave me a look, then headed into the next room—more Botticelli, his most famous painting, The Birth of Venus, the goddess on the half shell, as beguiling as any woman in the history of art, though I thought Alexandra could give her a run for her money.

It was hard to tear myself away, but I was glad I did when we came into the next room where the lights were dim and Leonardo’s unfinished masterpiece, The Adoration of the Magi, hung on the center wall. I’d seen the painting in reproduction, but nothing had prepared me for this, half the painting just drawing on canvas, Leonardo’s hand totally visible. The Madonna in the center was little more than a line drawing, a beautiful ghost, the figures around her in various stages of finish or not at all, the combination riveting. It was as if I could see Leonardo thinking, making decisions as he worked. In the background, a lone tree was completely painted while the landscape and action around it—walls, horses, and hills—were just sketched in.

“What do you think?” Alexandra asked.

“That it might be the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen,” I said, my eyes tracing charcoal and brushwork, feeling all the emotion packed into half-finished faces. It felt as if Leonardo were speaking to me across time, drawing me into his world and into the past.

“It’s too bad he didn’t finish it,” Alexandra said.

“I’m glad he didn’t,” I said, a part of me thinking it was intentional, that Leonardo had been brilliant enough to stop painting at this incredible moment, when things were still coming together. The journal played in my mind, Vincent at his worktable in the Louvre, constructing a frame for the Mona Lisa, and for the first time, I could really imagine how it must have felt—the power Leonardo had to lure you in, to make you part of his living, breathing artworks. “I love seeing the artist’s hand at work.”