(last week at the new American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Seen it how many hundreds of thousands of times? But there’s a lot to be said for the aura of the original. The painting has been placed at the end of a long sequence of galleries. You first see it from a distance, and walk towards it, super-framed by the individual gallery entrances running down the hall, and then framed by a reproduction of the original golden frame. What most surprised me is the size of the picture. I had no idea it was so big.