The delights of an 18th-century love story; the glitter of 16th-century gold; noble portraits of swift steeds; the civilizations in the Eastern islands of the Great South Sea, and the opulence of Venetian Orientalism. Transhistorical dialogs begin with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's piece about Dayanita Singh's photography and commentary on a recent Paris auction. A legendary book about the Nibelungen from the early 20th century is echoed in the fables and myths in Vittorio Zecchin's painting cycle, The Thousand and One Nights, from the same period. Another dialog unfolds between the 16th and 18th centuries, with a look at a rare manuscript recounting adventures and colonization of Eastern lands in the 1500s, Antonio Filipe Pimentel's article on the cenotaphs of the Escorial, Andrew Graham-Dixon's penetrating examination of George Stubbs, horse portraitist in England in the 1700s, and Benedetta Craveri's elegant depiction of an art-inspired love story in pre-Revolutionary France.