Good morning. With the assistance of his young student Titian, Giovanni Bellini made a painting in 1514, “The Feast of the Gods.” It’s terrific and someday maybe you’ll see it for real at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. They’re all there: Mercury, Jupiter, Cybele, Pan, Neptune, the whole gang. Everyone’s drinking wine, eating, hanging out, and even if creepy Priapus is about to try to grope a sleeping Lotis (in the story, he fails and everyone laughs at him), it’s still a nice image of what it’s like, what it was like, to gather a lot of people together to celebrate nothing in particular. Someday, some way, we may do that again.

Source: New York Times May 11, 2020 14:26 UTC