The Metropolitan Museum asked the novelist Guadalupe Nettel to look at one small enamelled plaque of the winged lion of Saint Mark, made around 1100 for an abbey in southern France, and she gives it the kind of attention a writer gives a line she is not sure about yet. An institution writing about a single object in its own collection, by someone with no stake in the catalogue, which turns out to be the most useful kind of looking there is.

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