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I rarely photograph entire paintings at exhibitions. Someone else has already photographed them better. Exhibition catalogues and professional photographers preserve the whole. What interests me are the details: the ones that make me stop, the ones that feel almost private. They reveal less about the artist than they do about the person looking.

Walking through The Women Alchemists at Palazzo Reale in Milan, I found myself drawn again and again to fragments: the curve of a silhouette, a plant emerging from a woman’s chest, a veil of verdigris against gold. They were details that moved me and that I remember more than the dimensions of the artworks themselves.

Perhaps that is what great exhibitions do. They do not ask us to remember everything. They leave each of us with something different.

I spent the longest time in front of Alethea Talbot Howard. She stands against a gold background, her face lifted towards the sky, somewhere between ecstasy and contemplation, a plant growing from her chest as if knowledge itself had taken root within her. It is a painting of extraordinary stillness and monumental proportions, yet it feels unexpectedly intimate. I found myself wondering about the longing this woman must have carried across the centuries. She did not ask to be understood. She simply asked me to stay.

Another artwork, Leona Constantia, has remained with me for different reasons. Her body echoes the shape of the sunflower she holds, immersed in a sea of reds and greens interrupted by slashes of gold. Looking at it, I stopped seeing a woman holding a flower. I saw a woman becoming one.

Transformation is everywhere in Kiefer’s universe.

Gold is not ornament. It is transformation made visible. It alters the physical presence of the work. It catches the light, expands the space and makes the paintings merge with the surrounding architecture. Yet what stayed with me was not gold itself, but what it represented: the possibility that matter can become something else. That stories can find another language. That history can become living presence.

I left the exhibition thinking less about painting than about meaning.

As artists, it is easy to become preoccupied with composition, color or technique. Kiefer reminded me that technique serves an idea, never the other way around. His paintings are rooted in history, philosophy, mythology and literature. They are dense because they are nourished by decades of reading, questioning and thinking. Standing in front of them, I realized that the question is not whether a painting is beautiful. The question is whether it carries a necessity. I do not want to paint like Anselm Kiefer. Nor do I believe that is what great artists ask of us. I want to paint with greater necessity. I left Palazzo Reale with dozens of photographs on my phone. Almost all of them are close-ups and details. That feels appropriate. The whole exhibition belongs to Anselm Kiefer. The details I chose now belong, in some small way, to my own story.

Perhaps that is what every important exhibition leaves us with: not answers, but better questions, questions that continue their quiet work in the studio long after the museum doors have closed.