Historical accounts of weeping before paintings were once common and unremarkable

Elkins combs through centuries of diaries, letters, and travel journals and finds a startling pattern: visitors to churches, galleries, and private collections frequently described being reduced to tears, trembling, or even collapsing in front of specific paintings, and they wrote about it without embarrassment, as an expected part of serious looking. This wasn't confined to obviously tragic religious scenes; landscapes, portraits, and abstract compositions could all trigger this response.

He treats these accounts as more than curiosities — they suggest an entirely different relationship to images than the one most people have today, one where strong emotional response was considered evidence of a painting's power rather than a sign that the viewer had lost critical distance. The frequency and casualness of these reports across different eras and cultures rules out the idea that they were simply exaggerated rhetorical flourishes.

Elkins uses this historical record as his baseline, the thing modern museum experience needs to be measured against and explained in contrast to.

Takeaway: strong emotional response to art has a long, well-documented history — its rarity today is the anomaly, not the norm.