Art and sex and love in Swann in Love

The important theme - about art and sex - that Proust establishes in the second part, Swann in Love, of "Swann's Way" (Davis tr.) is the nature of mediated love - this section is about Swann's affair with the "courtesan" Odette de Crecy, and as the section begins it's clear that Swann is not particularly attracted to her - she's not his "type," as he notes at the end of the Swann in Love, if I remember correctly - and he finds her kind of dull even stupid and her friends insipid (they are), yet he goes every night to see her at the Verdurins' salon and takes her home every night yet, strangely, they never have sex, he never even touches her (strange) and he spends a lot of time with some shopgirl - we never see her, but Swann goes out wit her almost every night before arriving at the Verdurins'. Then something strange happens: Swann and Odette hear the pianist at the Verdurins' salon play a piece that Swann later identifies as the Venteuil sonata, and this melody - which Proust spends pages and pages describing, some of the best writing ever about a piece of music, especially one that exists only in the author's imagination, and whic nobody else in the salon can really understand - becomes for Proust a theme, "our song," to put it crassly, and leads him to begin to adore Odette; second, he comes to a realization that she looks exactly like a figure in a Boticelli fresco in the Sistine Chapel - and then he has real passion for her. He cannot, it seems, appreciate her beauty or anything about her until she is mediated for him by art - he has to "see" her through the lens of the artistic vision of another. The real woman is not nearly as sexually attractive as the image of that woman. For Swann, and maybe for Proust as well, art is the only gateway to perception.