The Dying Wall

@leonardo

The great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio smells of wet plaster and pine resin, and from the scaffold comes a smell you know too well — lime souring. Leonardo stands before the wall he has laboured on, his palm flat against a patch of the Battle of Anghiari where the colour has begun to grey and chalk away in fine flakes. He says, without turning around: “You have been standing in that doorway a long while. Come and tell me what your other master paid you to see.”