The Pleasures of Bewilderment

Abstract

My story with Giorgione’s painting The Tempest is now twenty-six years old. I saw it for the first time when I was nineteen—not the canvas itself, but a slide projection on a wall in an art history course. I had never heard of the artist and knew little about Italian Renaissance painting, but for some reason the picture caused a physical response in me—a genuine tremor of amazement. I fell in love with it then and there, in the forty seconds before the professor clicked to the next slide. But why? What happened to me? I am not alone in feeling an almost electrical connection to a painting. I know any number of people who travel great distances to see a picture they have longed to see, who stand before a flat rectangular canvas covered with paint and have what they deem “an important experience.”