How long could you stare at a single painting? Five minutes? Ten? What about a tiny faded sketch with torn edges, no bigger than a notebook? “You have to hold up the fragment,” said Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, “and ask what it means to you, without fear and without apology.” It takes more than a few minutes to resolve questions like this, but for Nemerov, it’s worth the wait.

Nemerov gave the annual Una’s Lecture this October, followed by a Q&A the next day with Professor of English Elisa Tamarkin. Nemerov's lecture, largely focused on a single sketch by the American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, illustrated the profound relationship between love and art. “Without love,” Nemerov said, “you’re not going to go far.” Tanner’s sketch is a simple self-portrait: the artist sits at a table with his hand pressed against his heart, his face turned in profile. But Nemerov finds meaning in the fold of his coat, the shading on his hands, even the negative space surrounding the figure. Just like our most loving relationships, Nemerov presents art as something we can always go back to. It can take a while to understand why we love a certain painting, but that commitment constantly yields new lessons and experiences — and to find meaning in a painting, Nemerov suggests, is to find meaning in oneself.

Tanner’s self-portrait looks as if it were made in haste. The twists and contours of his pencil are nimble in some places and rough in others: take the sharpness of his profile, compared to the heavy shading around the hand placed on his heart. However, these are the kinds of details Nemerov delights in. He reads the sketch as a visual expression of the phrase “heart before head”: when contrasted against the careful detail work on Tanner’s hand and chest, his head seems like an afterthought. Nemerov associates this with the kind of selflessness that love encourages. To feel love, he noted, “is to have one’s contours blurred.” Even in the sketch, the outline of Tanner’s body dissolves into empty space, interlocked with blank paper. Love evaporates the lines between ourselves and others, and the limits of our bodies become smudged and unclear. Nemerov called this lack of clarity a lifting, even a “resurrection from despair.” Love frees us from our own heads, he suggested; it forces us to forge connections with the world — not unlike Tanner’s pencil, inscribing itself onto a blank sheet of paper.

Nemerov’s love for art is a lengthy affair. It took him decades to truly understand his connection with his most beloved paintings, many of which he first discovered in his undergraduate years. He shared three of these paintings with the lecture audience, each of which depict some form of love. One of the paintings, The Nuns of Port Royale, is an odd image. Painted by Philippe de Campagne in 1662 and currently housed in the Louvre, it depicts two nuns sitting beside each other. One is reclined in a long chair while the other prays beside her. The spatial depth is slightly flattened, and the color scheme is dominated by somber gray hues. “I will have to divine from you why this is your favorite painting in the Louvre,” one of Nemerov’s friends once said to him. For a long time, Nemerov said, he didn’t know either. However, his experience of fatherhood reminded him of the painting’s story: the reclining nun was actually the artist’s daughter, recovering from an illness. She receives love freely and “without apology,” allowing herself to be the subject of both medical and artistic attention. Nemerov’s connection with the painting is the kind of thing that could only be understood through time and experience.

Sitting in the lecture, my mind kept drifting back to a summer I spent with my friend Isabel. The two of us saved up money from our restaurant jobs and took trains through Europe together, stopping at art museums almost every day. In Amsterdam, we wandered into the Rijksmuseum. In the last gallery, there was a wall of dazzling Vermeer paintings. Before that day, I had never felt an affinity with the Dutch masters. I had always thought their paintings were drab and colorless, snapshots from a world I had no interest in. But in that gallery, I suddenly felt captivated by the way Vermeer painted rippled skirts and glossy apples, wooden window sills and dark shadows. He afforded attention to every part of the world, no matter how small and insignificant it might have seemed. We spent a long time in the gallery, shifting between paintings and peering as close to the canvases as the docents would allow.

I never asked Isabel why we liked those paintings so much. I wish I had, although I can’t help but wonder if it’s the kind of thing that Nemerov was describing. Strange and unexpected images strike us, arresting us with their potency, and yet it takes us years, if not decades, to discover why. For Vermeer, painting was an act of devotion. What would it mean, I wondered in Nemerov’s lecture, to devote oneself in return? To devote oneself to a painting not for five minutes, but for a lifetime?

Another of Nemerov’s favorite paintings was Christ and Mary in the House of Nazareth by Francesco di Zubarain from 1640. In the painting, a teenage Christ sits beside his mother in a dark room, pricking his hands on a crown of thorns. A stormy sky brews outside their window. Nemerov noted how the storm makes it look as though the room has been lifted in space — almost as if the house is floating. However, Christ and Mary are firmly pinned to the ground. Their weighty robes pool around their feet, and each of them are bent over their laps on sturdy wooden stools. “Love is a stability in a storm,” Nemerov said of the figures in the painting. For a long time, I had thought that love and art could only be storms; I had always imagined these concepts as sites of pure sensation. I often thought of a line from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, when she describes how the former soldier Septimus Smith experiences London: “Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world.” Wasn’t that the purpose of art, to melt the flesh off the world and reveal what lies underneath? But, as Nemerov showed in his lecture, art and love are many things. They can be just as stabilizing as they can be disorienting, as comforting as they can be frightening. Love can be hazy and blurred, like the lines in Tanner’s sketch, just as it can be perfectly obvious, like an apple in a Vermeer painting. Zubarain’s painting depicts both these ways of loving — storm and stability — without favoring one over the other.

Nemerov’s artistic knowledge stretches far past the Renaissance. His 2023 biography of the painter Helen Frankenthaler, Fierce Poise, follows the artist as she made a name for herself in New York’s male-dominated abstract expressionist movement. Nemerov often described love as a lightness. That same light quality shines in Frankenthaler’s work: she created bright washes of color by pouring watered-down oil paint onto bare canvases, stunning the postwar art scene. However, like all great artists, her work was initially mocked by her art school peers. Nemerov noted that one of her classmates said her paintings seemed like “she made them between cocktails and dinner.” One could say the same of the Tanner sketch, which looks as if it were made quickly, without much forethought. However, as Frankenthaler once said, “The lightest touch is the hardest of all.” It’s difficult to make art look as breathless as love feels, and yet her work encapsulates it perfectly.

In his 1854 book Walden, Henry David Thoreau argued that we’ve lost our ability to read properly. He instructs readers to constantly search for new meaning in their books, no matter how many times they’ve read them. "There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives,” he writes. To me, Thoreau’s idea of proper reading seems like a form of love: paying close attention, always discovering new and unexpected things within a text. It bears similarity to Nemerov’s approach to art. “Paintings are your friends,” he said in his lecture, “They are smarter than you. If you stick with them, they have something to tell you.” I kept thinking about the Vermeer paintings in the Rijksmuseum. I still didn’t understand his work, but I did trust that something important was sitting in the shadows of his paintings. And maybe one day, in ten years or forty, I would look at them again and see what I had missed.

Nemerov’s lecture showed how art teases love out of us, calling forth whatever it is that connects us to others. The Romantic poets sometimes called it “fellow feeling.” I don’t know what to call it, but after Nemerov’s talk, I think I know what it looks like: folds of fabric, light through a windowsill, a hand on a heart.