- Asher goes to Florence and has a really amazing time. He goes to pretty much every art museum in the city, but pays special attention to the Piazza del Duomo, which features a marble sculpture by Michelangelo called the Pietá. Asher draws the sculpture over and over and over again. He also begins to draw pictures of his mother.
- He visits a yeshiva in Florence that his hard-working dad helped found, and begins to get a sense of Aryeh's accomplishments. Then he decides to travel to Paris, where he's greeted by teacher from yet another Aryeh-founded yeshiva. He's impressed.
- He settles in Paris and starts to paint like crazy once again. Some of the paintings are of his mythic ancestor, some are of his mother, and some are of the Virgin Mary. It's a mixed bag.
- But then he starts work on two weird and intense new paintings, which are something unlike he's ever painted before. They're of his mother being crucified in the window of their Brooklyn apartment, with Asher on one side in his artist's getup and his father on the other side in his traditional dress and attache case.
- Painting these pictures stresses Asher out, because the crucifixion is a symbol of Christian suffering—not exactly something that really religious Jews tend to associate with.