She is awed by the vision and doesn’t say anything for a moment. They all stare at the wall in silence.

“So,” she resumes, “the artist was saying to us that this isn’t really about a Madonna. The real miracle is the painting itself, which lifts us and carries us away to this magical world.”

And then she is walking again, backtracking through the rooms. “I have something else wonderful to show you,” she promises. She marches them briskly through the empty Snyders Room, calling up in her memory and then reluctantly rejecting canvas after canvas. They are wonderful-enormous market scenes teeming with dizzying heaps of fish and baskets of produce-but it would be cruel to describe such pictures to starving boys. Similarly, she skips past the frames that held Fyt’s still lifes, with their artful arrangements of dead game and glistening fruit.

They pass into a dark passage lit only by Marina ’s kerosene lamp. At the start of the war, the Raphael Loggias, a glassed arcade with exquisitely detailed frescoes covering every surface, were boarded over from the inside and sandbagged up to the top of the windows. The frescoes were left in place, though, and as they move down the darkened tunnel, fantastic images emerge from the shadows, wavering in the dim light and then receding again. Painted squirrels climb columns decorated with elaborate scrolls of oak leaves. Greek athletes strike poses in medallions on the walls.

“This loggia is five hundred years old. It is an exact copy of the original in the Vatican, which was painted by Raphael and his students. This style of ornamentation was seen in classical Rome and was called grotesques.”

Every surface is crowded with animals and fruits, with real and imaginary creatures-a porcupine, a crow, a unicorn and a satyr, lions’ heads and equestrian mounts and winged angels-an illustrated encyclopedia of the world. The lamplight flickers in water-darkened mirrors, and as they pass, their own images jump out at them. Above, in a succession of vaults, loom sea-dark scenes from the Bible.

At the end of the loggia, they emerge into another denuded room. She draws them into a half circle around the first in a row of freestanding panels.

“This is the spot that held one of the most prized paintings in the entire Hermitage collection. The painting is called The Holy Family, and it was painted by Raphael.”

Marina gazes at the panel. “I don’t know that I will be able to do it justice,” she admits. “It’s such a wondrous painting because Raphael took these mythical characters, the Virgin Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child, and he reimagined them as real people, an actual family. If they were real, they wouldn’t be gilt and perfect. And so what he came up with was this rather melancholy little family portrait. On one side,” she says, pointing, “we have Mary. She is beautiful but very distant and unaware. And quite apart from her, over here, is Joseph. He’s much older than Mary. He leans on his walking stick and looks almost frail. Between them”- Marina points to the exact center of the blank square-“standing on his mother’s lap, is the Christ Child. He’s a mama’s boy. He is eyeing Joseph fearfully and his arms are reaching out for his mother. Joseph’s expression, I think, is one of resigned disappointment, a father whose child rejects him for the mother.”

The boys are staring at the blank square, their eyes unfocused and dreamy.

“They have halos,” an older boy murmurs.

“Why yes, they do,” Marina responds, a little taken aback. “You have been here before?” she asks him.

The boy’s eyes drop to the floor. “No, comrade,” he murmurs. “It is just…” he points to the framed space, unable to complete his sentence.

Marina is puzzled, but she continues. “One wouldn’t notice the halos at first, but they are there, fine as piano wires. It’s almost as though Raphael was saying that what sets them apart from any other family is almost invisible. They might be us.

“Now, over here was Raphael’s Conestabile Madonna.” She leads them to another panel, this one very ornate and gilded like the proscenium arch of an old theater. There is nothing in the center where the stage would be except a darkened square of paint.

“The Conestabile Madonna was one of only three paintings that were packed with their frames. Which is too bad for us, because the frame itself was quite beautiful and elaborate.” She describes the frame and then works her way in to the round canvas at the center. “Everything in the painting has been arranged to fit inside the circle,” she says. “The Madonna’s head is slightly inclined”- Marina demonstrates by tucking her chin just so-“and the shore of the lake and the distant mountains curve into the center.”

She sees something that has escaped her notice before. It is very faint, but there seems to be another face hovering in the sky just to the left of the Virgin.

She describes the Madonna before her, how small she is, how delicately colored, her formal, upright posture, the way her heavily lidded eyes are distant and peaceful. And the way that the child appears to be reading the open prayer book in Mary’s hand.

“Of course, the logical explanation is that he is simply attracted to the book, as toddlers are. But Raphael’s contemporaries would have seen it differently. They would have seen a miracle.”

Just inside the left edge of the frame is the faint outline of another child, a child that is not in the Conestabile. It is like having double vision, as though her memory were blurring. Marina remembers her teachers in school describing a phenomenon called pentimento. Indigent painters would sometimes reuse canvases, covering over inferior paintings with a coat of pigment and then painting a fresh picture. With time, as the oils aged, the old image might appear ghostlike behind the new. An eye would peer out from the folds of a woman’s skirt, a piece of fruit would hover in a cloudless blue sky. She wonders if it is possible that Raphael used this canvas before he painted the Conestabile.

A second Madonna is coming into focus, and then there are three toddlers ghosting and overlapping one another, and one of them holds up two sticks lashed together in the shape of a cross. With a shock, Marina knows all at once what she is seeing. It is Raphael’s Alba Madonna, the one that disappeared, just as Anya described it. She reaches out to touch the canvas, but there is nothing there, just the paneling.

She turns to the boys, her face radiant. “Do you see?” she asks them. Past them, she can see other paintings in the Skylight halls. Her vision is filling with color and images.

She sweeps through a doorway, beckoning breathlessly for them to follow. The hall is so cavernous that lamplight doesn’t reach the far end. Above, the barrel-vaulted ceiling recedes into black. From the darkness comes the steady drip of water hitting water, each drop echoing in the chasm. Except for the enormous frames that line the walls, the vast room is empty.

“Look here.” She details for them a dramatic scene, three women surprised at an open tomb by an angel. Then she describes another picture, this one showing the Virgin being taken up into heaven. Then another, the conversion of Saul. As she talks, images appear inside the gigantic frames. The pictures are wild with stormy skies and electric emotion, and as Marina ’s sweeping gestures paint the scenes, the lantern sways, throwing wild swoops of light up the walls. Figures appear out of the shadows, their robes swirling, their hands raised in amazement.

“All this is yours, comrades,” Marina tells them. “Can you see?” She is ecstatic. Her voice trembles when she speaks, but her eyes are bright and calm. “It’s all yours.”

Ravishing splashes of color pour out of the darkness and resolve into images-paintings that hung elsewhere in the museum, paintings Marina remembers and others that she has only heard tell of. The room is filling with women, with children, with saints and goddesses, and the boys are whispering among themselves. They point at the frames on the wall, at the paintings crowding the edges of the lamplight. The captain is weeping. He is staring at the wall, wiping at his eyes. “Look,” he says to no one in particular. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” He points to a spot at eye level on the wall. It is Giampetrino’s Madonna, and she is staring right back at them.