Art That Keeps You Coming Back June 8, 2012, 2:30 pm "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain," Georges Braque once said. It may be possible, however, to explain why you love a particular work of art, and in a column in Friday's Times, I made a stab at doing so, writing about my repeated visits over a decade to a wonderful, deeply unsettling Caravaggio painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Denial of St. Peter." It has become like a fascinating, stubborn, moody old friend - one I admire, argue with and don't pretend to know very well, even after so many years. My email inbox has been flooded over the last few hours with readers relating their own obsessions with paintings and sculpture, at museums around America and around the world. Some wrote about looking fairly deeply into "The Denial of St. Peter" themselves over the years, and seeing a very different painting from the one I've come to see, which is exactly the kind of response I'd hoped the article would provoke. A few correspondents read my love of the Caravaggio from a distinctly and even devoutly Roman Catholic perspective. I'm not Catholic, but inevitably I look at lots of paintings made at the behest of, and made possible by, the great wealth and power of the church. A woman who lived in Portland, Ore., for many years wrote succinctly and poignantly about her sadness that, in moving to Providence, R.I., she had to leave behind a beloved ivory carving of "a Japanese fisherman and his duck" at a Portland museum. "I look forward,"she added valiantly, "to becoming friends with new works in The Smallest State." Do you have a painting or sculpture, a drawing or installation - or even an old chair, or a ball gown or a helicopter - that you have kept up a regular, not to say obsessive, appointment with? If so, we'd love to hear your stories in the comments below.