As a birthday present, Jonathan gave me a lovely trip to Siena. We stayed in a beautiful hotel near the Campo and had one of the best dinners of my life in a tiny, elegant restaurant tucked away on a side street. The best thing, though, was a surprise to us both -- they are restoring the Lorenzetti frescoes from 1338-9 of the "Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Palazzo Publico and we were allowed to go up on the scaffold where they are working and see it up close.

Now, you may think that seeing a 700-year-old fresco about the allegorical effects of good and bad government would be a rather dry, cerebral, academic experience. I certainly would have thought that before I was up there.

Before we were allowed up, the guide -- and, in fact, everyone we talked to -- warned up repeatedly to be careful (which was understandable) because we might step backwards and fall because of the extreme emotion we would feel (which was not).

"Well," I thought to myself, "Italians are probably brought up on 700-year-old government allegory frescoes and will naturally react with an intensity of feeling that will elude an American heathen such as myself."

I cried.

I was so overwhelmed that the only thing that kept me from stepping backwards and falling to, if not my death, then at least a very serious injury indeed, was my overwhelming urge to get even closer to these magical paintings.

And we were already pretty damn close -- maybe four feet away. Certainly closer than Lorenzetti ever would have imagined that anyone other than himself would ever be again. The things that he painted there were made knowing full well that they would be invisible from the ground so very many feet down below.

But he had -- for no other reason than love -- made this tender, breathing little world up there. A tiny bird the size of my thumb in a birdcage in a window. The frills and laces on the shoes in a shoe shop. A dragon fly pattern woven into a lady's dress. The expressions on the face of two men -- not to mention the one on their horse's -- so vivid, so full of life, painted for no one's pleasure but his own.

Jonathan used to work with a woman at CSU-P who was constantly telling the students to "fake it 'til you make it." It drove Jonathan nuts. What about living authentically, instead of being a fake? What about being who you really are and owning that and taking pride in it? What about doing your best rather than merely pretending to? What about putting real effort into your endeavors, not to make a big show but because the striving itself is valuable to you? Because the striving itself is ... noble? Even if no one ever sees it.

And so Lorenzetti's bird in its birdcage was the very opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" -- made not for show, but in secret, a hidden treasure that only he would ever know about. And, because of that, its power is such that people are overcome to the point of stepping backwards off of scaffolds. Fake art doesn't do that, I don't think.