“The artist’s hand,” Alexandra repeated, taking hold of my mine impulsively or unconsciously, I didn’t care which, a small jolt of electricity at her touch.

She led me down the stairs, but I would have followed her anywhere.

At the bottom, I felt something, stopped, and turned.

“What is it?” she asked.

For a moment, I’d felt as if someone was following me, but of course, there were people everywhere. “Nothing,” I said and shook it off.

We cut through rooms of Mannerist painters—Pontormo and Bronzino—artists known for overstatement and embellishment, Parmigianino’s wildly exaggerated Madonna with the Long Neck, where I might have lingered, but Alexandra was already heading into another room, where she finally stopped, and I joined her.

Two women held the general down. One of them drew a blade through his neck, blood spilling over the side of the bed.

“One of my favorite paintings,” she said, “by one of my favorite artists.”

“Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes.”

“Are you reading the label, or do you know it by sight?”

“It’s a pretty famous painting,” I said, though it was the first time I’d seen it outside a textbook. “I do an entire class on Artemisia.”

“Really? My art history teachers hardly mentioned her. Amazing, isn’t it, all the action, as if it could start moving, like a movie, and the look on the general’s face—you can practically hear him screaming!”

“One of the few great women artists of the Renaissance,” I said.

“That we know of,” Alexandra said.

“It was her father who taught her to paint.”

Alexandra turned to me then. “Are you giving him the credit—her father?”

“It’s a fact, that’s all.”

“Either she had the talent, or she didn’t!” Alexandra bit off the word. “She’s as good as any of the Renaissance men!”

“No argument from me,” I said, hands up in defense.

We stood there a moment, and I could sense her anger.

“Sorry,” she said, but I could still feel it coming off her, heated and indignant; then she turned and faced another painting. “If I believed in God, this painting would make me question his existence.”

It was Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham about to sacrifice his only son, hand pressing the boy’s head to a rock, knife raised, the boy’s face distorted with fear.

“What kind of sadistic God asks a father to kill his only child?” she said. “What sort of father could do that?” She shook her head as if trying to dislodge the thought, and I felt it again, a kind of white-hot anger that was out of proportion to the art or the moment.

“Hardly anyone paints as well as Caravaggio,” I said, trying to bring our conversation back to the painting, pointing out Caravaggio’s dynamic composition, the way he swept your eye across the canvas, the combination of beauty and ugliness as well as something new and old, what artists had been trying to achieve for centuries, which had me thinking of Vincent in Picasso’s studio.