Last Wednesday afternoon, Gallery Assistant Jason Holler spoke with a visitor who had a fantastical memory to share on one of the masterpieces in the Old Masters exhibition. He asked her to write it down, and this is what the note reads:

“In the 1950s, my mother’s living room was sort of Danish Modern except for a large reproduction of Tiepolo’s The Crucifixion over the television. As a 3-year-old, the picture frightened me enough that if the room was dark, I wouldn’t enter unless I had a flashlight. I would shine the flashlight directly on the picture to make sure none of the figures had climbed down off their crosses or moved. I can vividly recall shining that flashlight on that picture numerous times, but I don’t know what became of it. We moved when I was four years old and the picture did NOT go with us.”

One thing I enjoy about this little story is it illustrates how much drama the brain can extract from just oil on canvas. No surround sound or eye-popping special effects, and still figures descending from a picture is surely as riveting as any half-hour of Up in 3D. (And can we imagine how that ghastly execution scene looked to the less culturally-stewed 3-year-old?)

Like reading a book as opposed to watching a movie, a painting leaves room for the imagination to create sounds, smells, textures. (The clopping horse, the flying dust, the wailing women-I feel chaos in The Crucifixion.) We learn about ourselves in this process of viewing. We’re active creators, and although the painter, like Paolo Domenico Finoglia with his Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, may guide our gaze through the use of shadows and shapes, the mental reel while looking at a painting is different for each person, and the uncharted territory is exciting.

A side note: When I googled “The Crucifixion reproduction,” thinking about why people buy reproductions, a link to Dali’s The Crucifixion popped up, and I recognized it as a framed poster, which I had observed in bewilderment as a 4-year-old in my Cajun mamaw’s living room.