Bearing Fruit.(art appreciation and Masterpieces of European Painting exhibit from the Norton Simon Museum)

We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one. Turning away, we don't exactly forget, but our recall of the experience--how we felt, looking--starts to edit what we saw. Some details and qualities are magnified; others evanesce. With time, the picture becomes ever more ours and less the painter's. My several visits to the best painting in the world, Velazquez's "Las Meninas" (1656), at the Prado, instruct me in the phenomenon. My first reaction is always disappointment at the coarse, almost drab, handmadeness of the big (but smaller than I thought) canvas, the absence of a glamour that I have cherished in memory and may have refreshed by contemplating glossy reproductions. (Reproductions are pandering ghosts; they tell us what we like to believe.) Then, rather abruptly, I find myself under Velazquez's spell again, as if I had never been before--pitying the fool that I must have been when I last viewed the work. This time I get it! But will I keep it? Not a chance. The moment I am back out on the streets of Madrid, my memory will have begun complicating, with my heart's incorrigible partialities, the simplicity of naked brushy paint that describes a little girl, at the center of a courtly society on a certain day, being offered a red glass of something.

Encountering one of the five canvases in "Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum," a pithy loan show at the Frick Collection, has shocked me with really embarrassing proof of my memory's fecklessness. The painting is a supreme work by Velazquez's contemporary, friend, and sometime peer Francisco de Zurbaran. (Both were from Seville. Velazquez landed the nation's plum job of court painter; Zurbaran subsisted on religious commissions.) "Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose" (1633), the artist's only signed and dated still-life, amounts to three pictures, side by side, in one: a silver plate holding four citrons (baggy, nubbly cousins of lemons); several oranges with stems, leaves, and blossoms, heaped in a basket; and a two-handled gray ceramic cup, apparently filled with water, on another silver plate, with a pale-pink rose facing it from the plate's lip. The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground; sunlight rakes them from the left. Scholars speculate that they allegorize virtues of the Virgin Mary (citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on--allegory bores me). Certainly, there is a sense of conceptual rigor in the work's rebuslike presentation, which invests ordinary comestibles on a piece of domestic furniture with the gravitas of a sacrificial altar. I was overwhelmed when I saw the citrons in the picture, many years ago, at the Simon, in Pasadena, California (inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi). Ever since, they have served me as a touchstone of painterly potency. I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflections, in the fruit's soprano yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn't remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

Well, yellow is my favorite color. And the painting's other, more muted hues were likely dim prior to a recent cleaning. But current brain science affords me a less pathetic excuse. Research has confirmed what experience posits: strongly emotional events linger in vivid but narrowly focussed memory, etching certain facts--a gun pointed at you, say--while occluding pretty much everything incidental to them (such as the color of the gunman's hair, or whether he had any). In fact, this work still strikes me as principally about those citrons, never mind their impeccable companions. The fruit's fierce materiality and celestial beauty channel the essence of the artist's national, historical, ...