This week I received an email from an old roommate to inform me that an art history professor of ours from the semester we spent in Italy had unexpectedly died over the weekend. The news surprised me; I hadn’t really known him very well, even when I was a student of his, but he was easily one of the best teachers I ever had. The enthusiasm and knowledge he demonstrated in on-site lectures were unmatched, and at every site we visited, small groups of tourists would inevitably start listening in and following us at a distance, until he laughingly told them there was no need to be shy; they were welcome to join us. More than once, the ends of his lectures were met with rounds of applause from people none of us knew at all.

One thing he made his students understand is that art is about connections between people. Just as his love of art united those unknown tourists – Australian and Japanese vacationers wandering through the Roman Forum or Vatican City – to us – American students sipping espresso and imagining ourselves very cosmopolitan – he showed us that art could connect us to people across time and space. As we stood in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi staring in awe at Caravaggio’s energetic paintings of the life of St. Matthew, he made us understand what those first viewers must have felt as they gasped in fascinated awe and shock at the unconventional and humane representations of such an auspicious saint. When we studied the cold, fascist sculptures in Mussolini’s EUR section of the city, we shared the chilled, stark apprehension that people felt decades ago.

Because, really, that’s the power of art, isn’t it? It connects us to people and emotions and situations that we otherwise might know nothing about. We can study history and science, but art is how we understand how people of the past reacted to those things. It is how we understand how people reacted – and continue to react – to the most joyful and the most tragic of life’s situations. I might not know you, but when we stand before Michelangelo’s Pietá together, you and I and Michelangelo together understand the same feeling of losing a loved one.

This connection to the work is a reason many people hang prints of their favorite works of art in their homes; there’s a need to retain that relationship between viewer, subject, and artist. But a print is just that – a print, removed from the physical act of applying oil to canvas. A custom oil painting reproduction of one of those works, however, can add back in the emotional dimension of the artist’s hand on the canvas. The original master’s emotions are captured in the image’s structure, subject, and composition, and the care and passion of the reproduction artist are captured there, too.

Once you’ve felt that connection to humanity through art – the connection that wonderful professor showed me and my classmates as we gazed up into the dome of the Pantheon and looked into the eyes of Bernini’s Persephone – a poster just doesn’t quite cut it anymore. Art is about something bigger than oneself, and a custom oil painting reproduction crafted by an artist can help retain that feeling of connection in your home every day.