Gabriele Finaldi and I are speaking on the phone so I can’t see the painting he is describing, but I start to feel that I too love Titian’s 1514 Noli me tangere just from listening to him articulate the things that move him most about it. I have asked him which painting in the National Gallery’s collection most speaks to him as a Catholic. Polite, utterly unpretentious and highly articulate, he seems genuinely pleased to have been asked the question.
“It is a wonderful balletic rendition,” he explains, “of that Gospel episode where Christ seems almost to be pirouetting as he moves away from Mary Magdalene, who seems desperately wanting to keep hold of him, with that beautiful landscape behind.
