I invited my friend Emma to join me and we arrive separately but easily find each other. It’s a bit spooky because the normally heaving area outside the Gallery at the top of Trafalgar Square is deserted bar a few homeless people sleeping on the sunny grass, a photographer taking advantage of the tranquillity, and a couple of skateboarders. Not a living statue to be seen!

So let me tell you about the exhibition. ‘Titian; Love, Death, and Desire’. These were painted for Prince Philip of Spain, who was married to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s eldest, staunchly Catholic daughter.

They’re based on Classical myths, primarily from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, and the exhibition reunited the six paintings for the first time since the 1560s, so it really was once in a lifetime.

Previously I mentioned that I’d bought membership to the National Gallery during lockdown specifically so I could get preferential booking when the exhibition re-opened. As it happened the National Gallery did 2 members only days before opening to the public on Wednesday 8^th July. It was worth every penny.

Normally exhibitions like this are really busy, lots of Brits, but also lots of tourists. They can be noisy and cramped, and often people lose sight of common decency when it comes to not marching in front of a group of people and stopping directly in their eye-line. I find this very annoying, especially because I’m pretty short, so I struggle to jostle for a space where I can see. And more importantly you need to see these paintings from a fair distance, they’re big and you really need to take in the whole scene to appreciate them.

To my astonishment, the gallery was basically empty. We were joined by 4 other people at its busiest, so our views and experience were phenomenal. The paintings themselves were mesmerising, there was so much detail, yet they needed to be viewed from a distance. We saw gods and goddesses, stags, dogs, nymphs, a strange angry looking fish, and Titian captured a range of human emotions such as guilt, shame, shock, love, desire; along with stunning scenery, milky white flesh, classic draped fabric, pools of reflective water, pillars and archways.

I’ll definitely go again, it was fabulous experience. I doubt I’ll have the experience of an empty gallery quite like that again, but then really let’s face it, nothing about 2020 has been normal really has it?