In 2012, the people of Ireland were asked to choose their favorite painting in the world. They did not choose a Caravaggio, a Vermeer, or a Monet. They chose this: two lovers saying goodbye on a staircase... It is called Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, painted in 1864 by Frederic William Burton. It is a watercolor, which makes its richness and depth almost impossible to believe, and it hangs today in the National Gallery of Ireland. The story comes from a medieval Danish ballad. Hellelil, a noblewoman, fell in love with Hildebrand, the prince who had been assigned to be her personal guard. Her father forbade it and ordered her seven brothers to kill him. When they attacked, Hildebrand killed six of them. At Hellelil's desperate cry, he spared the youngest, and that hesitation cost him his life. He died of his wounds. The surviving brother imprisoned her, and she did not live much longer... Burton could have painted the battle. He could have painted the deaths, the grief, the blood. Instead he chose the one intimate moment before all of it: the lovers passing on a turret staircase, stealing a final embrace, knowing what is coming. And every detail in the painting carries the weight of that knowledge. He does not seize her in passion. He bows his head and kisses her arm with a tenderness that is almost unbearable, because it is goodbye. She does not collapse into him. She turns to climb the stairs, her face hidden from him and from us, because to look back would make it impossible to leave. The Victorian novelist George Eliot saw the painting and described it perfectly. The face of the knight, she wrote, is "the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament." And that is precisely why it has moved people to tears for more than a hundred and sixty years. It shows something that most of us have felt: not love at its beginning, when it is easy, but at the moment it must be given up, which is the moment that reveals everything it was worth. Burton understood that the most powerful thing he could paint was not the tragedy itself, but the last gentle second before it arrived, held forever in paint, so that the two of them never have to climb those stairs apart. Eliot, who was a friend of Burton's, captured it best: "It might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world, but the artist has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion." I started this newsletter because our predecessors left us extraordinary things, and almost no one teaches us about them anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join here: James-lucas.com/welcome And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

In 1625, a sculpture was unveiled in Rome that made the people who saw it believe in miracles. And the man who carved it was just 23 when he started... The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, written in the year 8 AD. Apollo, struck by Cupid's golden arrow, falls helplessly in love with the nymph Daphne. She, struck by Cupid's arrow of lead, despises him. He chases her through the woods. She runs until her strength gives out, and then she calls to her father, the river god Peneus, to save her. Peneus answers his daughter the only way he can: he transforms her into a laurel tree. Her feet take root. Bark closes over her skin. Her arms become branches and her fingers become leaves... Gian Lorenzo Bernini chose to carve the exact moment it begins. Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned the work in 1622 and Bernini bought the block of Carrara marble that August. He worked on it for three years and by the time the sculpture was finished in 1625, he had done something no one had ever done in stone. Apollo's fingers press into Daphne's side, and the marble gives way under them like flesh. Her toes have become roots, and you can see the bark spiraling up her leg. Her hair fans behind her as if still caught in the wind. And at the tips of her fingers, where her hands are turning into branches, the marble becomes leaves so thin that light passes through them. When it was unveiled, Bernini's biographer Filippo Baldinucci recorded what happened: "Immediately when it was finished, there arose such a cry that all Rome concurred in seeing it as a miracle." 400 years later, the sculpture has never left the room it was made for. It still stands in the Galleria Borghese, in the same villa, in the same city where it was first called a miracle. Centuries have come and gone, and Daphne is still mid-transformation, frozen forever in the instant before she disappears... If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the wonder and beauty of history. You can join us here: james-lucas.com/welcome Subscribe and never miss a story like this.