As he crosses one empty street after another, the cathedral’s broken drum peeks out from over rooftops, regarding him for the first time. Beside her, Giotto’s Campanile rises — a slender column of marble reaching for the sky, a bell tower that the cathedral clasps close to her side as if it is a staff to lean upon, steadying herself — wrought of the self-same stone.

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Chapter 11: View from the Belltower

A string of gems winds along the old Roman road on a caravan of oxcarts, oxen straining uphill and kicking red dust into the air. From Siena in the south, great blocks of stone the colour of baked clay wrestle in their ropes warmed from the sun. From Prato in the north, another caravan approaches the city walls — this one, a necklace of green-grey serpentine cooled on the foothills of the Apennines, and carrying the scent of mountain air. From the northwest, bone-white marble is dug from the distant mountains of Carrara and hauled down the high quarry road that overlooks the sea — a procession of glinting vertebrae curving inland, still flecked with salt spray.

From every horizon they have come, making their slow approach — marble in the hues of rival cities converging upon Florence. Here, the builders stack the stones one atop another, pressing them into an unlikely peace: a patchwork rising beneath a Tuscan sun. The harsh light casts along the tower’s edge, the burned reds softening to rose and blush, the Prato green fading into the tender shoots of sage.

At the base of the Giotto’s Campanile, the patterns are bold and plain — a doorway framed by bands of solid colour and simple design. Inside, a stair coils upward along the inner wall, the steps smoothed by the endless feet of bell-pullers, climbing every hour. Outside, scenes carved in hexagonal panels of stone and higher still, statues retreat into their hollowed niches as the restless light plays across the façade. With every storey the stonework gathers itself into finer work: marble twisting into floral patterns that dance in the light, drinking in more and more of Carrara’s pale light until, at the belfry, the whole seems spun into lace. The bells hang there, bronze darkened with age, hot where the sun pours through wide filigreed openings.

Florence, 2010

“Would you like to see the view from the top” A man gestures upward, to where the top of Giotto’s Belltower disappears into the glare. The voice is brusk, hurried, ‘Four hundred and fourteen steps’, and then he smiles, adding quickly. ‘and there’s no lift.’ His eyes glance to my worn sneakers as he taps his ticket book “There’s a group leaving in five minutes.” and he points to where a line of tourists snakes around the tower.

I laugh too quickly. “Oh — no, I’m with a tour group.” and I look around as if to prove it, but I don’t recognise any of the faces around me. In the piazza, There are four tour groups all crossing over one another their bright flags bobbing in different colours —none of them the royal blue of my tourguide. None of them, I think horrified, as I squint through a sea of caps and umbrellas of every other colour.

I must have drifted off again.

Up close, the marble had been far softer than I imagined — not the blinding white I had expected, but a warm cream, well-worn, textured and shadowed with soot. The air smells of stone and sunscreen, and the cobblestones uneven beneath my feet.

A knot of students stumbles out from the tower doors, spilling out into the square, flushed and breathless from the descent. They circle one another searching for a space to spread out, laughing as they come to rest, hands cupped on their knees for a moment, before straightening again, lifting their faces into the light.

They talk over one another, their words indistinct. Then from among them, a young woman’s voice bubbles up through the deafening sound of chatter on the square. “C’est Incroyable!” she laughs, turning to the young man beside her. Lifting her arm, she stretches her hand out before her, fingertips undulating as though tracing the Tuscan hills hazy on the horizon, grazing the dips and valleys in her mind’s picture.

Incroyable. The word echoes in my ear, catching and looping — the nasal in, the lifted croy, and the soft able, that dissolves into silence the way that so many French words do. What she has seen is impossible to hold, and already slipping from her grasp.

For an instant, it flickers across her face — or else I have imagined it — a trace of frustration as she lowers her hand. That seeing weaves itself to the present and fades so quickly, already the picture as thin and delicate as gossamer, coming apart like dandelion in the noise of the crowded piazza.

I blink and look around for my brother’s cap, his oversized blue t-shirt, a saturated royal blue cutting through the mottle of black and beige. At last I spot them, Dylan walking beside my father, my mother a little off to one side, and I hurry to rejoin them as they round the corner of the cathedral, coming to the Tower’s western face.

‘Giotto’s Belltower’, the guide is saying ‘Completed in 1359. Giotto began it, but did not live to see it finished.’

I move closer, folding back into the group, and try to imagine it — the tower as it would have stood then, with its colours new and impossibly sharp. I tilt my head back, squinting to see where our guide is pointing.

Her fingers trail high above her head, pointing to the hexagonal sandstone panels on the façade of the tower. “Carved by Pisano,” she says. “1338. In the first panel, God creates Adam, In the second, God creates Eve, and in the third panel — The Labours of our first parents — they are banished from the garden.” The scenes stand high upon the west face of Giotto’s tower, looking out over every visitor who has passed by here for six hundred years.

For a moment I shift my feet, casting a sudden glare at the tour guide, my eyes darting to her as if it might be her fault. Not even one panel, I think, for the Garden itself. As if it had all happened so quickly. As if the dream could have faded so soon.

Image Credit:
Catedral, Florencia, Italia, Photographed in 2022 by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA

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It was an ancient Roman idea — the octagon.

The building that would later be called the Baptistery of San Giovanni, had been raised when Florence was but an infant herself. Its shape was a kind of sacred geometry, neither a rigid square, belonging to the earth, nor an eternal circle, for the endless heavens — but a bridge between the two.

As the centuries turned and the theatres fell silent, the bathhouses gathering weeds, the aqueducts cracked and turned dry. The Christian church came upon her then — a cracked shell amid broken arches and scattered stone. They found her shape pleasing, for it could be turned to their purpose. They bound the form to their own story: seven days to make the world, and an eighth for rebirth.

Because nothing is ever so final that it cannot be reclaimed, nothing so fixed that it couldn’t be turned to another purpose.

The crowd presses in through the Baptistery doors.

Outside, voices still carry across the square, but once the threshold is crossed, reverence steals their tongues. Grey morning light falls away as they shuffle forward, a tide of townsfolk drifting into the dim hall, footsteps smoothing across worn marble. For a moment the chamber is swallowed in shadow, only the rustle of fabric, whispers sinking low — then the sudden screech of benches dragged across stone, echoing upwards like startled birds into the vault above.

Matteo follows close behind the broad shoulders of his father, as the column sways out into the hall, snaking into rows of waiting benches to left and right. He breathes the rich spice of incense, its perfume long steeped into the chamber itself.

Ahead, marble pillars rise to frame a marble dais, raised beneath a wide canopy, all hewn from stone. Tall-backed seats of carved walnut are pressed shoulder to shoulder, in row upon row, inlaid with velvet cushions of deepest crimson waiting expectantly for the judges to arrive.

Brunellesco moves to take his seat, using a hand to steady himself, but Matteo stands a moment longer, tilting back onto the edge of one heel, pivoting slowly anticlockwise, his gaze sweeping the hall. Along the northwest wall, a neat row of seven guilded panels catches what little light there is. Clustered before them, murmuring and nodding, capped heads tilt from one scene to the next — one more golden surface beneath a mosaic sky.

To the left, Matteo sees his brother. Filippo is being herded toward the front row to where the other contestants sit apart, halfway between the audience and the dais. His boots drag on the marble like a reluctant mule as a young usher urges him on. And Lorenzo, patting the empty seat beside him, grinning at Filippo’s unease.

Still turning, and Matteo’s chestnut eyes reach the chamber’s angled edges, where the women and children are pressed to the patterned walls, and receding between stone pillars. Mothers balancing babes upon their hips, whispering to keep them still. Matteo scans their faces, pale ovals in the dim light, and catches sight of his mother just as the great doors beside her groan shut with a sonorous boom, sealing them all inside.

The square outside is left empty now, the townsfolk drawn within.

Two buildings remain, regarding one another across the cobbled square, long companions. The Baptistery of San Giovanni, compact and octagonal, and the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore towering above it, her unfinished drum piercing the sky. Both clad in the same Florentine skin of white and green, their patterned stone dulled beneath their blanket of grey.

Between them, cobblestones darkened by damp, reflect the shifting light. Shafts of sunlight break through the cover, and the clouds begin to thin and loosen, revealing patches of pale blue sky.

At the end of the hall, the north doors groan, creaking open on ancient hinges. A wash of daylight slips across the dais where carved chair legs had cast their long black shadows only moments before. From the distance comes a bright staccato, heels striking stone in crisp succession, gowns on a train of fresh-shone shoes as the jury files swiftly in.

They are led by two of the Priori of the Signoria cloaked in robes of crimson, followed by stern-faced men wrapped in velvets dyed deep as ink. Their steps stop short as they fold stiffly into their pillowed seats, the settling of weighted cloth and the faint glint of rings as hands fold into laps. Whispers pass between bent heads.

At the pale-grey marble lectern centered on the dais, a red-robed Priore mounts the step, running his fingers across the stone, its deep grey veins crisscrossing through pale marble like the lines on a map. He lifts an arm in a sweeping arc, his sleeve unfurling in a gesture that takes in the seven contestants, the thirty-four seated judges behind him, the seven darkly gleaming panels, and before him, the packed audience pressed shoulder to shoulder beneath the octagonal vault.

Speaking with the authority of the Wool Guild, custodians of the Baptistery, his brassy baritone voice rolls through the hall, rebounding against the walls. The chamber breaks into a smattering of applause, before settling into coughs and the restless shifting of feet. And at once the proceedings begin.

The first goldsmith crosses the floor to stand beside the speaker as his name is spoken in full. He watches with wary eye as his panel is removed from the wall by assistants who carry it forward, straining, setting it heavily upon the lectern for the audience to view:

It is Abraham, burdened with the weight of his duty, his robes whipping in an unseen wind, and Isaac, but a child kneeling before the edge of a guilded knife. His mouth is open, but no sound comes. And above them, a brilliance — a hand reaching out.

The speaker’s words flow over the image — a sermon of sorts, as many in the audience lean forward, murmuring as if they might see. Yet few in the hall, only those close enough and keen of eye, see any more than a few glinting details. The goldsmith, wearing his half-smile as a mask, braces himself against the words, whether they be favourable or no. His eyes wandering the room, before bowing to the speaker, and returning, relieved, to his seat.

Another guilded Abraham is lifted from the wall. In this one, the scene lies shallow, barely pressed into the bronze, the figures timidly outlined, as if the craftsman had been afraid to claim the space. The speaker nods kindly toward young Lucco, earnest and pale, who bows his head as if in apology for the gentleness of his hand.

And still the procession continues, one frieze set down and lifting the next.

Outside, the sun wheels high above, tracing its slow arc across the sky. It lights first upon one facet of the baptistery, the light slipping off the slanted marble, and spilling upon the next — as if the building were nothing but a small octagonal sundial, drinking in the light to measure out the hours of this drawn-out theatre.

Inside, the judges nod, quills scratching at parchment, as if their verdict were yet to be decided. But Matteo, for one, knows this is all for show. The judges stare into the plain bronze backs of the panels as each has its moment upon the lectern. The decision would have been made weeks ago, in the Guild halls, where they could argue bitterly between themselves, no doubt. Or else why the delay?

From the benches, half-listening to the Priore’s droning praise, Matteo’s eye wanders, over the men seated in his row. Across the hall, sits young Donato among Lorenzo’s many apprentices — a fine face, though poorly dressed, his father only a wool comber. Yet he tips his chin high, a smirk tugging at his lips. Some are set to benefit no matter the outcome.

Across the hall, Donato grins. He knows each goldsmith well, and each of the seven panels bears the unmistakable hand of its maker. He laughs again, in delight. An artist, he thinks, is one who imprints his own true nature into the bronze, whether he intends it or not.

Lorenzo Ghiberti is called upon next. He strides across the hall, his robes brushing past the lectern on his way to stand beside the speaker and bows with grace, extending an arm wide to take in the judges. His Abraham brims with theatre, robes sweeping like banners across the frame, with gestures so broad they seem made for the stage. Lorenzo clasps his hands as if in prayer, the pink in his cheeks visible even to the women crowded in the back of the hall, the light seeming to favour him.

The audience sees a guilded scene gleaming, whole and convincing. But from the back, which only the judges can see, Lorenzo’s panel leaves a gaping hollow — as if a great chunk of bronze had been scooped out — seven kilograms of bronze had been saved in the pouring. In a door of twenty-eight panels, their cost would be greatly reduced, and all the judges know it. None more so than the banker among them.

Filippo shifts in his seat, twisting at the girdle that bites into his ribs. His shoes pinch, the stiff leather tightening, his feet swelling in the stifling heat. The lace at his throat clings, damp against his skin. One by one the names had been called, and all the others had crossed the floor and returned. Now he alone, hot and restless and full of agitation, remains to be called upon.

At last the words ring out:
“We call upon Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi.”
Filippo, who was son of Brunellesco, son of Lipo Lapi. He rises quickly, grateful to be moving. And although his feet ache more with standing, he marches heavily across the hall, arms awkward at his sides. Filippo stands before the audience, coarse-featured and plain, a heavy brow, a blunt nose — in garments fine but ill-fitted to his frame. And yet there is an unmistakable directness in him, a sharp intelligence that will not suffer fools.

His frieze is much the same: unsparing and dramatic in its tension. Where others had added flourish, he had held to the truth of the texts, rendering it with the sternness that the scripture had suggested — a father raising a dagger to a son.

He had thought it a strange image to present before a baptistery. The guild’s choice of story revealed much of their intent. Yet he had rendered it faithfully, perfectly, and without excessive ornament, down to the finest detail. The ones in the audience who can truly see, reveal themselves now, for they lean in nearer, as if something in the bronze had unsettled them. It carries a gravity that the others had lacked.

The speaker goes on, and Filippo grimaces despite himself as if the Priore’s words pain him, the words of praise ringing hollow to his ear. Does the bronze not speak clearly enough? Does it not speak for itself? With one sharp dip of his head to the speaker and one to the crowd, he turns and strides back to his seat — eyes fixed ahead, avoiding the silent laughter glittering in Lorenzo’s eyes.

On the dais, the quills are moving, scratching over parchment with the dry rasp of reeds, while judges cast sidelong glances at one another. The slips are gathered, counted, and stacked into two neat piles. The Priore turns, gesturing for the other — his crimson-robed counterpart, to join him at the lectern. The first Priore clears his throat as he lifts a slip of yellowed paper between finger and thumb. His voice rings out like a tolling bell.
’By my count, I have seventeen votes for Filippo Brunelleschi.’
The second Priore speaks, a honeyed tenor. His hands betray him, twisting in his coat-sleeves while delivering the words: ’I have seventeen votes for Lorenzo Ghiberti.’

High above the lectern, in the golden vault, a mosaic figure peers down spreading his arms out wide on judgement day. His gesture is one of calculation, subtracting a sinner’s deeds against his virtue — but today his arms remain perfectly level, unwilling to tip to one side or the other, as the numbers below come up even. Even the angels around him stop their wheeling, trumpets falling limp at their sides, to watch.

Below, the audience stirs, an astonished murmur fluttering through the crowd.

“As you can see,” says the first, tilting his head in consolation “the choice was simply impossible,”
“And so” continues the second, “It is proposed that the commission be shared between the two finalists.”

From the back of the hall a fan snaps shut and an infant’s thin wail cracks through the murmur, a mother’s voice hushing to soothe the swaddled babe.
“Impossible“ Filippo’s father scoffs, his words low, his head turning to left and right, seeking allies.

The two Priori of the Signoria raise their hands for quiet. “The two winners should work together,” concludes the first Priore, nodding in confirmation that the matter was now decided, and he gathers the two piles, stacking them as one. He eyes the audience levelly as he squares the edges neatly against the lectern. The second Priore lifts his arms in invitation to the two young rivals, with enough levity to lighten the room. The audience gives in to compromise and the chamber breaks into applause.

And Lorenzo, without wasting a moment — leaps up to cross the floor, drawing the crowd’s eye with him. Behind him Filippo follows in his wake, uncertainty dragging at his heels. Lorenzo mounts the marble step, bowing with a flourish that sweeps the hall, and turns, so graceful that it feels rehearsed. Facing Filippo, he extends a hand — a gesture of welcome, a hand poised to draw Filippo up into the space beside him. Yet in that very gesture, he towers above, claiming the height, leaving Filippo reduced by the very invitation.

Three golden rings glint, set on the fingers of Lorenzo’s outstretched hand — a palm as soft as a newborn babe.

And Filippo sees it.

There are moments where time folds in upon itself. A single gesture throws open a door, and the years spread out before you — the child, the apprentice, the master, the man — strung together like stars across a darkened sky.

Filippo, looked upon that soft unmarked hand. It was so unlike his own. And there he saw an image — of himself as a man bent low in another’s workshop, streaked with soot and ash. Around him, apprentices hammering in time, but never to his command. Above them, Lorenzo would parade like a prince, basking in praise, taking the credit and coin. Lorenzo, who would gladly melt a panel down and recast it whole if the purse jingled with enough gold.

Before long Filippo would be told where to set his tools. Soon, he too would be taking instruction from the baker’s boy.

Filippo saw all this, written in that one smooth hand — a row of golden rings glittering before him like tiny suns.

A sharp intake of startled breath tears through the chamber, a single inhalation by a hundred open mouths. Without realising it, Filippo had already taken a great step back.

He had not meant it. It was as though the ground itself had shifted beneath his feet. He needed nothing more than a moment’s pause, a sliver of time to think — yet his body had betrayed him, his heel sliding out behind to steady himself, as if the hand stretched before him was not an invitation but a serpent poised to strike.

They had all seen it. And it could not be undone.

The silence that follows is unbearable, ringing louder than a bell. He watches Lorenzo’s face and sees the half-smile still painted on his lips, but hardened now, eyes sharp — glinting daggers.

The gasp still hangs in the air as Filippo turns away. The judges sit frozen on their dais, but he only walks on. His heels strike marble, the echoes too loud, ringing unnatural in his ears, so that he quickens his pace, cloak dragging at his shoulders. Whispers collect in his wake and heads turn silently to follow him, tracking his progress in disbelief. Somewhere in the benches his father flushes, as the colour rushes to his face.

But Filippo is almost to the doors now. Eyes stinging, he fixes his gaze straight ahead, avoiding the gleaming sliver of cream brocade appearing just at the edge of sight. He knows the pomegranate pattern is there, and with it his mother — her pale egg-white skin cracking into fine lines as her face stretches into a mask of worry.

The doors loom before him, three times his height, and twice as heavy. He lays his hands against them, cold against his fury and they gape open, sending a sharp wedge of sunlight to slice through the hall. The audience, already craning their necks now lift hands and elbows to shield their eyes against the sudden blaze.

Then the doors shut behind him.

Daylight blinds him, dazzling white, broken only by the thin chirp of birds twittering in the empty piazza. And scattered chinks of sunlight pushing through the parting clouds. The air is icy against his flushed skin. He pulls off his cap, releasing a wave of sudden coolness as he passes his fingers through sweat-dampened hair. Giddy on the cobblestones — he feels crazed, and lost, and free.

He turns in a half-circle, swinging back to stand before the Baptistery’s dark door, sealed now, he feels that it might never open again. He will not be there when it does. With sudden urgency he moves away, marching briskly across the square and down the quiet street, as if sensing the townsfolk chasing at his heels. And all the time thinking: What have I done?

As he crosses street after empty street, the cathedral’s broken drum peeks out at him from over rooftops, as if regarding him for the first time.

Image Credit: Michelangelo - circa 1509 - ‘Expulsion del Paraiso’

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Filippo stands draped in his plain white undershirt, linen falling softly across his shoulders. The terracotta tiles are cool beneath his feet, and clammy with morning damp. From the square, a bell tolls the hour. Each toll sinking into tile and stone, a deep vibration rising through the soles of his feet. The echo drifting through the open window where the curtains stir, carrying with it the scent of wet stone.

On the chair beside him lie the clothes he had chosen the night before: a tunic of deep mauve wool and a plain leather belt. Dignified, or so he had thought. But then had come the knock. His father had stepped inside, and with one glance at the laid-out garments, his mouth had tightened into a thin, silent line. He had made no gesture, said not a word, he only turned and walked out again, the weight of his disapproval trailing behind him.

Minutes pass, and then, with no great surprise, Matteo appears at his door, arms heaped high with velvets and silks. He spreads them out across the bed with exaggerated ceremony. First, a pale silk shirt with its ivory lace so fine the collar and cuffs seem to froth on the air. Filippo lifts a silken sleeve, the fragile lacework spilling between his rough, stained fingers — mocking in its delicacy. He groans.

Matteo sets each piece out: an undercoat traced with gold, delicate patterns threading through the fabric, and a deep green velvet overcoat, its panels stiff and structured, parted at the elbows to let the gold patterning of the undercoat’s sleeves show through.

His expression is grave in imitation of their father, but Filippo catches it — the faint twist at the corner of his mouth — the smallest glint of pleasure at playing this role for his older brother.

Piece by piece, the fineries begin to close in around him. Silks, wools and velvets and a pair of dark hose. Pulling them on, he wiggles his toes to test their strength.

Their father returns in a long gown of severe blue velvet, a hint of crimson silk in the lining of his sleeve as his impatient hands reach to cinch a thick girdle at Filippo’s waist.

Filippo is sure his room has never felt so small, the narrow walls pressing in as the parade of finery continues. Watching with weary eye as a gold signet ring is pressed into his palm, a gem-studded gold brooch in the shape of a hummingbird pinned to his cloak, its gemmed eye glinting.

“Pippo — your feast-day shoes! How are they so scuffed?” Matteo asks, producing a pair of slightly pointed leather shoes. “I will oil them and buff them,” he promises, “and I will see them shining like new,” his voice trailing down the corridor in search of an oilcloth.

And now, Livia enters. Her gown of silken brocade bears a bold pattern of pomegranates in shades of cream and rose. Her eyes shine, but her smile stops short, restrained. Her skin glows pale and unnaturally luminous, the effect of a thin wash of egg-white that has dried, tightening to pull it taut. Her cheeks are dusted with the faint dusky rouge of madder root.

A cloud of scents drifts with her. Rosewater he recognises, but the rest he cannot place, strange and foreign to him, clinging to her, borrowed airs. Beneath them, the sharp tang of vinegar cuts through. Filippo has a sudden thought of kitchen jars when she was pickling onions, and those pale bulbs shrunken and suspended in their sour brine.

She carries, two-handed, a small round mirror, in a frame of ornate design, turning it, gleaming, toward her son.

Filippo meets his reflection suspiciously.

The man looking back at him shines like a stack of gold florins. But already the lace clings at his throat, the girdle biting at his ribs. He tugs at the collar, shifting restlessly in his new skin.

Brunellesco pauses at the threshold, scanning the open street, then gestures for his sons to lead the way.

Tilting his head towards Livia, he turns out his arm and offers her the crook of his elbow. Livia rests her hand there, her fingers light, with the other, she tightens the fastening of her bonnet. They move in step, the fabric whispering across the stones as they step out into the street.

Outside, the air is growing thick with humidity, the sun smothered by a low blanket of cloud that sags heavy, pressing down on the city.

Filippo makes his way beneath his burden of cloth, eyes low to the ground. The rounded cap traps the heat against his skin. Already beads of sweat are rising at his temples, threading damp through his dark hair, pooling where the lace bothers his throat. The furnace on pouring day is nothing compared to this, he thinks. This heat has no escape.

Ahead of them, pigeons scatter as figures emerge from side streets in their twos and threes, all pulled toward the same direction.

Livia sees the crowd thickening: merchants in their stiff collars walk alongside apprentices from the workshops, mothers leading their children, all in Sunday dress. She hears the thin wail of an infant, and turns, searching the crowd, but the sound blends into the gathering murmur. With her free hand, she smooths the fabric of her gown, but when she looks again at her husband, she feels how her composure has slipped — a thread of unease pulled to the surface before becoming aware of it. She holds on to Brunellesco’s arm more tightly than before.

The current carries them forward, drawn as if on strings, toward the waiting octagonal hall — the Baptistery with its doors open wide, yawning to let them in.

At the Baptistery of San Giovanni’s south door, a pair of lanterns burn stubbornly against the grey. An attendant straightens, scanning the tide of townsfolk as they enter. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a brilliant shimmer of brocade as Livia passes by him, the textured ivory pattern of her gown briefly catching in the lanternlight, as she crosses the threshold.

Filippo shuffles in, blinking, his eyes straining against the dimness. The marble tiles spread out beneath his steps in fine geometries, a chessboard of black and white.

He lifts his gaze. Eight walls of marble rise up around him, paler as they climb. A row of narrow windows punctuates the stone all around, and above them, a row of smaller windows still.

Still higher, and the walls draw inward, tapering into a great octagonal vault. Its surface fractures into a million tiny squares, mosaic tiles of glittering gold, each one catching and multiplying what little light the windows will allow.

At the crown, where eight walls converge, the great octagon tapers into a single small window cut directly above, where a sliver of outside’s grey peers in. Its weak light, pouring down the great stone funnel, spilling down the marble walls, glancing off the patterned floor, and rebounds upward again.

And once the eye has adjusted, the chamber is not so dark at all. Gradually, the space begins to glow, bathed in amber radiance that seems to come from everywhere all at once — a heaven of mosaics come alive, swarming with faintly glittering angels wheeling among the solemn saints — and the damned.

Image:
Mosaic detail, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence. Created by Coppo di Marcovaldo, circa 1225–1276, with each tiny square of glass and gold leaf, around ten million of them, laid by hand.

Image Credit:
Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen for Wikimedia Commons © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

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There had been many Florences.

The first, Florentia, had been founded in the first Century BC as a Roman military camp. Her shape, scratched in the earth with a soldier’s precision, a tight square pressed between the Arno and the place where the great cathedral would one day rise. Her streets ran straight, crossing at right angles. A man could walk her length, from wall to wall in minutes, as she defended the ones who had built her, and those who came after.

But Florence would not stay small. Her walls groaned with the press of people until they burst outward, and the builders poured themselves into the fields, stacking stone upon stone, raising up a new wall with its towers and gates. And once each was guarded to keep the danger out, the old Roman walls were torn away, and Florence unfurled, settling into her new skin.

It happened again and again. In the twelfth century as wealth poured in, Florence spread outwards to gather the bankers, the merchants and the markets. In the fourteenth, Arnolfo’s wall reached farther still, encompassing orchards, monasteries and farmlands. That wall had taken fifty years to build — eight and a half kilometers of stone now encircled the city, crowned with seventy towers and six great gates.

And so it was that five Florences had grown, each nested inside the other like the rings of an ancient tree — each wall a circle of stone to hold her people near.

Now, beyond the press of the city’s centre, far from that Roman grid, the cobbled streets give way to winding lanes that dip and bend through the outskirts, their ruts holding the last of the rain, and the air smelling of tilled soil. Some roads are lined with the tall dark spires of cypress trees, others with blackberry thickets where thrushes and blackbirds quarrel over the last berries of summer.

Here, near the edge of Florence’s last embrace, stands a tiny house with its roof patched in a quilt of reds and browns. Late-afternoon light slants through the leaves, dappling the grass with shade and gold. A cool breeze stirs the branches. The trees bend low under their burden of ripened fruit, the scent of straw mingling with the sweet rot of fallen plums as lambs nose through the shadows, bleating contentedly.

Beside the house, a rough shelter for sheep, its open side letting the animals wander freely in and out. The wind whistles faintly through the gaps in its wooden slats. Inside, the earth is bare and trampled, ringed with dark circles where buckets once stood. Along the wall, a pair of great iron shears, wool combs with their long wire teeth, hayforks, nets, and bales of straw, stacked and leaning against the raw timber beams.

At a rickety table in the centre, a boy stoops over a lump of red earth. His stained fingers working the clay into form, shaping and smoothing, then stops. Stepping back a pace with head tilting, as if to test the figure from another angle, his eyes narrow. For a moment he stands still, a frown. Then, back to work as he moves in again, his hands quick and sure, the clay yielding to the scrape of his tools.

A lamb nudges between Donato and his bucket of muddy water, and without looking, he shoos it away, brushing the fleece with the back of his hand.

From the cottage, his father appears, trudging across the yard with a wooden stool in one hand and a bucket of raw wool in the other. His grey curls catch silver in the light as he lowers himself onto the stool with a grateful exhale and wipes his hands on his apron. From the city a bell tolls, the sound carrying faint and hollow over the fields. Berto glances toward the distant city wall, its stone line cutting the horizon, before settling back on his son.

“I wonder what their excuse is now?” mutters Donato, half to himself.

The judgement was late. It should have come months ago, back when the sheep were being shorn and the air was full of pink plum blossoms. Now the season had turned, the fruit grown heavy, and still they were waiting.

There had been plague the previous year, and some said it had upset the guild business. Others whispered that the judges needed more time — that the votes were split between two favourites, Ghiberti and Filippo.

Only whispers.

Berto, looking into his pail of wool, raises his hand absently, and Donato turns to the wall to pick out the wool combs, placing them in his father's palm.

“But 34 judges,” Donato turns, shaking his head, incredulous, “and no decision yet?”

“Aye.” Berto sighs, drawing the wool through the teeth with slow, even strokes. “That Filippo is a master, for sure,” he chuckles, “but he’ll not bow to a committee. Can you imagine Filippo being told to bring out his sketches, so they can haggle over his design? Berto cracks into a laugh, his eyes glinting. “A man like that can’t be steered, you see?”

“And Ghiberti?” asks Donato, shoving a sleeve back up his arm with clay-damp fingers.

Berto’s hands keep their rhythm, comb rasping through the wool. “That one’s a talker. But he's thrifty, you see. He’ll use less bronze. He’ll weigh it like flour if it saves him a florin. The guild will like that.”

Donato scowls. “What are they judging? The man or the bronze?”

Berto’s face shifts, serious now, distant, as though his answer had come from hard-earned knowing. “Aye. That’s the right question.”

Impatience flickers in Donato’s eyes.

Berto sees it. The city would take its time; the guilds always did. But he knows the waiting gnaws at the boy. For himself, he’s been enjoying these long afternoons, his son working beside him, but he knows such days won’t last.

Donato’s youth is restless. He wants his future to begin.

“Well then, my Donato,” Berto says, slapping his knee with a grin, “you’ve played your cards well. If Ghiberti wins, you’ll have a place working in his workshop.” He leans closer, his voice warm, conspiratorial. “And if Filippo wins, you'll be needed in his.” He leans back on his stool, contented.

Donato’s attention doesn't leave the clay figure, but his mouth curls into a grin he can’t suppress.

“And maybe then,” Berto adds, laughter rumbling in his throat, “you’ll stop banging about in my shed, frightening the flock.”

Two boys tear down the muddy path, their bare feet splashing through puddles that mirror the pale blue sky. Their shouts carry on the cooling air, sharp as swallows cutting across the fields. Wandering chickens scatter with indignant clucks as Piero and Niccolò charge past, their cheeks flushed.

They are playing out a story they had heard.

The Trojan horse arrives at the city walls — a vast wooden structure, her timbers groaning. Except in their imagining, she does not come rolling up on wheels but floats up the Arno, her heavy flanks scraping the stone embankments, barnacled boards dripping with weed. Slowly, she noses against the arches of the Ponte Vecchio. She can go no further — for the bridge.

From deep inside her hull, a voice booms. Piero cups his hands around his mouth, his chest swells as he makes the words carry, echoing through the belly of the beast: “We bring you a gift. Let us in.”

And he grins wide, watching for his brother’s response.

Niccolò knows his part well. He gasps, clutching at his throat. He can hear them, the shuffle of a hundred blades of steel, glinting in the dark. His eyes widen.

He points, “It is a trap. Can’t you see?”

Piero swings around, his affect changed, his voice a high falsetto, hands clasped in mock delight. “Oh, wonderful,” He is speaking for the priests, and counselors, and merchants fat with coin — nodding and smiling, dazzled by a gift. Piero signals, “Let her in!” They see only the timber, and not the steel within.

“No! Send her away!” Niccolò shouts, stamping in the mud. “She is sent from our enemies,” he pleads.

“They can’t hear you, Niccolò.” Piero goes on, his voice dripping with disdain as he solemnly shakes his head.

“It’s a trap!” Niccolò shouts, shaking his fists in mock frustration. He whips an arm behind his back and pulls out an invisible spear, hurling it at the Trojan horse. “A spear through your wooden belly” he crows, triumphant.

Piero’s expression hardens. Slowly he raises his arms, mimicking the solemn judge, a finger pointed straight at his brother. Sentencing the messenger.

“Run!” Piero bellows.

Niccolò spins in the damp earth, already stumbling forward. He runs, his little legs racing to carry him, his brother on his heels.

“A slithering snake has your right arm!” Piero calls. Niccolò jerks his right arm stiff, running lopsided with one arm dangling in the air.

“A snake has got your left leg!” Calls Piero, laughing now, as Niccolò begins to hop wildly on the other.

“Now it has your right leg too!” calls Piero, running to catch up.

Niccolò skids to a stop and spins, turning to question his brother. “Wait, what happens if I lose?” Niccolò shouts, breathless.

“You turn to stone!” Piero whispers sharply, eyes wide.

“And what must I do to win?”

Piero’s eyes flash, his voice sharp as a trumpet. “You must run faster!”

And the two of them bolt beneath the fruit trees, shrieking, the puddles splashing underfoot as they flee from the wooden horse that only they can see.

Donato and his father watch as the boys’ game spills into the orchard, their shouts carrying through the trees.

Berto gives a scandalised shake of his head. “If their mother had overheard such play, she’d have crossed herself and rinsed their ears with vinegar for speaking of pagan things.” He chuckled despite himself, the lines at his eyes crinkling. “Where would they have heard such a story as this?”

“Better they stick to tales of saints and martyrs,” Donato shrugs. But he knows where they got this story, for he had heard it too.

Not in the classroom, where such tales were forbidden — but after class, his tutor, noticing his talent for shaping clay, had leaned in close, lowering his voice with a story: “Somewhere in Rome, lost,” he had said, “it had been written that there was once a stood a statue greater than any other in the world, stone so lifelike it might draw breath. Of Laocoön, the priest of Troy and his two sons, caught in the coils of serpents.

Donato had tried to picture it: Laocoön, who had warned Troy of the trap, raising his spear against the fateful timber horse when no one else would listen. For his truth he was punished, by his own people and by the gods, struck down as the serpents dragged him under — him and his two young sons.

The words rang in Donato’s mind. He had seen fragments of Roman statues, broken pieces, wondrous things. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine marble veins tightening beneath the skin, in the moment before that serpent’s strike.

Long after he had heard the story, whenever he saw a shard of marble unearthed from the ground, one thought came first to him: Laocoön.

The boys’ game runs on until Piero’s interest wanes and he declares that his brother has finally outrun the serpents. The boys turn back together, triumphant saviors of Florence once more, their laughter spilling into the orchard as the sun dips behind the wall casting a shadow that stretches a widening band of darkness at the city’s edge.

As the orchard sinks into shadow, the taverns begin to murmur. In the dark of the city, merchants lean over their cups of wine, whispers passing from one to another.

Had Ghiberti been seen in candlelit chambers, with judges and guild members, speaking softly, of votes not yet cast but already promised?

Some swore they had glimpsed him, a hand resting easily on a guild member’s arm, eyes half-lidded in conspiracy. Others swore it was only invention.

Still, the whispers spread, threading through the alleys, curling beneath the doors of guild halls, and winding their way through Florence. The city herself seemed to lean inward, her stone walls straining to listen.

Image Credit:
William Morris Hunt - circa 1845 - ‘Landscape,’ Credit Worcester Art Museum

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High over Tuscany, where the air is cool and crisp, a swallow is soaring on the afternoon currents. She follows the river north, a loose, winding ribbon of silver that catches the sunlight. Faint lines score the earth below — roads running northward from Siena. Thin smoke rises from the red roofs of Impruneta, a town that smells of baking terracotta all year round. Further to the north and east, the passes climb, winding into the Apennine mountains, and to the west, the bright distant shimmer of the ocean.

The swallow dips, gliding closer to a scatter of terracotta roofs, her black wings tapered into sharp tips. Her belly is as pale as chalk, her hood is midnight blue, gleaming as her feathers catch the sun. At her throat, the warm red rust of fired clay, as she trills her song on the air.

Her tail is dark, parted like the coat-tails of a rider, her chest held high, even as her bead-black eyes scan the river.

In a sudden swoop, she drops low, brushing one wingtip to lightly skim the surface of the Arno, leaving the faintest ripple — before she climbs again, banking over the Ponte Vecchio. She circles once above the cramped red rooftops, then drops lightly onto the warm clay tiles of a workshop roof, folding her wings tight to her sides as she comes to rest.

Below, on a workbench, where a stack of solid gold florins had been — each coin stamped with the image of Saint John the Baptist, each worth three pairs of good leather shoes or a mason’s week of wages — there is now only a low mound of fine metal filings. A hacksaw lies warm from use, its teeth grinning with bright gold swarf.

Beside it, a glass bottle from the apothecary, squat and weighty, sealed in wax. The label is inked in a careful Spanish hand: argento vivo — living silver — named for the way it slides and moves in the bottle, creeping along the glass as if alive.

Once the bottle’s wax seal is broken, the wing-footed Mercury is said to appear, standing just out of the edge of the goldsmith’s sight. He tugs gently, pulling with unseen hands, a thread — the lifeforce of the man who would dare to guild. When the thread runs out, Mercury will take him gently by the hand and guide his spirit to the underworld, or whatever lies waiting on the other side.

Filippo exhales through gritted teeth. And then — click. The wax gives way.

Now there is no turning back. He will work quickly to see it done, burned clean before nightfall, lest the vapours get him.

With great care, he tips the glass, the quicksilver, thick and heavy, a polished mirror that bends and shifts, as and when it wills.

Gold and poison do not wish to marry. The pestle circles round with the rough scrape of stone and still they resist one another. But the goldsmith persists, beating with mortar and pestle, the eight parts mercury to one part gold. And then slowly, and by degrees, as if accepting no way out, a softening, as the metals yield and take one another in.

The paste comes together thick as butter, a pale yellow-gray with a strange metallic weight. With a small brush, he lays it on swift and thick, deliberate, working the paste evenly over every rise and recess — coating the scene.

Across his face Filippo wears a damp, knotted cloth, a red line biting into the bridge of his nose where the linen rubs raw. A crease lines his forehead as he remembers the words of his tutor: “Do not breathe the vapours”. Easy enough to say looking over the faces of your students. Harder when the work is long and a man must breathe.

A sudden tilt in the clay floor tiles, gone as quickly as it came. He shakes it off, it is a tremor, nothing more. He straightens, touching the edge of his workbench, setting his jaw.

The problem is this: the vapours carry no strong scent. It's easy to forget. And when the guilder catches a sweetness on the air — it's already far too late. He hears a chuckle from deep inside his mind, or behind him in the workshop?
Who can say.

The furnace is modest, the heat kept low, easing the paste toward warmth. From its surface, mercury vapours rise, an almost imperceptible haze curling up, and up and —

A thud against rooftiles. Then a muffled roll. Something has dropped before the open door of his workshop.

It lies still. Feathered, with a rust-red throat.
Filippo's mouth forms a line. You picked the wrong roof, he thinks.

He does not move to the door. Let the bird keep it's place until nightfall — a small, fallen sentinel at his threshold warning anyone who might think to step inside.

Who knows where the vapours are curling now? Trailing along the floor, gathering in the corners? Soaking into rafters? Sinking into his skin?

At the furnace, the colour deepens with every pass through the heat, poison drifting off, delivering the gold on its way. Too much heat, too soon and the color will turn ashen.

He must work slowly. He must work fast.

Filippo's gaze slides upward, eyes narrowing into the rafters, willing no more birds —no more wings beating against the taint.

He wonders, not for the first time if that wing-footed god spared a thought for the souls of birds. Whether they awake wingless and needing to be carried into whatever murky depths lie beyond.

A light knock at his door. A figure stands at the threshold.

It is Livia, a woven basket balanced on her arm. Her expression is bright, but her eyes move quickly, catching on the bottle, the mortar, the furnace. Behind her, the day is warm, sunlit, the sky a pale blue — but its brightness does not reach him.

He turns sharply, the whites of his eyes showing. “Step away”, he snaps, pointing, “Can you not see?” His voice cracks.

He gestures again, to the limp bundle at the door.

She sets aside the basket. Then quietly, she leans to retrieve a small wrap of cloth. Filippo only stutters and glares up into the rafters, as if to unsee what his mother is doing. He will not argue with her. Gently she crouches, gathering the bird, tucking its wings snug to its belly and swaddles it, the way she once swaddled her children.

She looks up at him, her face tilts. “You’re looking pale,” she says.

“I’m fine,” he replies, too quickly. He waves a hand. “I’m almost done,” he lies.

She doesn’t answer. Just watches him. One long, level look that takes in the tautness in his shoulders, the way he leans on the bench with a hand to steady himself.

She knows the signs — knows that living silver brings on his dark, mercurial moods.

If I could, she thinks, I would drag him down to the banks of the river, make him eat something, let him breathe the clean air. Let the sunshine clear his head.

But she says nothing.

She knows that he is watching the daylight. Every minute spent with quicksilver evaporating in his workshop — she will not add to the danger.

Instead, she lets out the faintest sigh and lifts the lid of the basket.

“There’s bread,” she had smeared it with plenty of garlic, “a little bit of cheese, juniper berries — to cleanse the blood,” she says. “Promise me you’ll eat”.

Not waiting for a reply, she stands, touching the earth lightly as she rises to her feet. The dead swallow rests in her soft hand as if it is only sleeping.

Her eyes sweep once more over the workshop. Her quick smile does not reach her eyes, and a moment later, she has gone.

A few more passes through the furnace and at last, what emerges is the warm gold of honey, a thin brilliant layer, bonded to the metal but not yet gleaming — still rough.

A dull ringing settles into the space between his ears. He blinks. It will pass.

The final step takes days.

Filippo works slowly, bent over and silent, pressing the rough gold surface smooth — with agate, bloodstone and dog’s tooth, each chosen for it’s particular shape and bite.

His back aches and his knuckles stiffen.
The work is a kind of prayer.

He falls into a rhythm older than thought — pressure and release, pressure and release — until the scene begins to bloom. The gold surface smooths to a mirror sheen, with a radiance that catches the light like still water at sunrise.

And Filippo, the priest of this unlikely temple, kneeling at his altar with a ritual that has passed through centuries of makers — and passes through us still — has baptised his scene in gold.

It is radiant, concealing all the pain and sacrifice it took to make it so. The polish seals it in forever, the sweat and the time and the effort. He had pushed it down until all that remained was a surface so bright, so seamlessly perfect, that it could fool the eye into believing it had been effortless.

A simple scene from the book of Moses.

He covers it in a wrap of plain white linen. He packs a cart with straw, as the porters do, and carts it, wheels creaking and protesting loudly — to those proud doors of the Arte della Seta with his head held high, as if it weighed nothing at all.

Image Credit:
Gentile da Fabriano, circa 1420, ‘Coronation of the Virgin’
Image courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum.

The double doors of the Arte della Seta Guild stand solid and imposing, dark wood bound with bands of iron, framed with thick stone columns rising into a great stone arch. They serve as a reminder to all who pass by that the Guild of Silk and Goldsmiths is a door not open to all. To enter, you must earn the right.

Beyond, the corridor stretches awhile before opening into a large echoing hall. Two guild officials stand beside a heavy iron scale, its chains creaking softly with the weight of copper ingots — warm, rosy, and reddish-gold in the lanternlight. Each ringing a dull chime as one is stacked atop another.

A heavyset merchant lifts each bar in both hands, placing them neatly in a growing pile. He moves with ritual precision in a coat of crimson, lined with saffron silk. A matching rounded cap sits snug atop his head, nearly covering the grey at his temples. He nods once to Filippo, his eyes glistening softly, as a money pouch sways at his waist, suspended from a fine leather belt.

The second merchant, tall and wiry, calls out the weights from the scale, enunciating more clearly than strictly necessary. His voice is clipped, sharp, echoing in the high-ceilinged hall. He wears striped stockings in indigo and slate, a hint of lace at his collar and cuffs. He watches with piercing eyes as a porter steps forward and begins to carefully wrap each ingot in linen.

Filippo lifts one of the copper bars, testing the weight of it. The surface is faintly murky, brushed and striated with fine imperfections. It is tapered, stamped with the maker’s mark, and cool to the touch.

Beside the counter, two handcarts wait, each packed with straw to muffle the ring of metal on metal. Better not to draw too much attention. The porter begins stacking the wrapped copper bars into the carts.

The tin ingots are smaller, silver-grey, and slightly mottled, a lighter clink as they’re added to the carts — nine parts copper to one part tin. The ancient recipe, passed down from the Romans.

And a little something else, too.

The merchant produces a flat, dark, dense piece of lead, no larger than a deck of cards, and places it in Filippo’s palm. It is heavier than it looks.

In the furnace, lead stings the nostrils and gives off a sour metallic taste in the back of the throat. Metal fume fever brings headaches and stomach pains — or worse. But it aids in the pour, making the bronze alloy more fluid, letting it reach all the fine details for a better finish.

Such is the cost, Filippo thinks. Beauty always requires a little poison.

He glances at his father, searching for a subtle sign that all is in order, knowing that his father gives little away.

With a nod from the merchant, The porters throw on more linen coverings and fall into step behind them. The wheels creak under the weight of the load.

Filippo and his father turn and make their way down the long corridor, their steps echoing behind them. As they reach the threshold, the man in the striped stockings leans to the other, stooping slightly.

"A curious detail," he whispers, “that Master Ghiberti’s order had come in light — a few kilograms short, by my count.”

The other shrugs and furrows his brow, looking back at the two figures, small now after stepping out into the street — shrinking into the light, the large doors swinging closed behind them.

Outside, the wind is rising.

It whips through the narrow streets, catching folds of fabric, tugging at cloaks and sleeves. It whistles between buildings and down alleys, up into shutters and pulling them loose. The porters hunch forward as they push the handcarts beside father and son, silent behind creaking wheels. Straw muffles the sound of metal, but Filippo hears it still — the slow, steady march of his copper and tin.

The sound of it shakes loose his hands’ memory, taking him deep inside the process. Though his feet are striking stone beside his father, his mind is already lifting the crucible, steadying the pour. Though the bars beside him are solid, wrapped in cloth to quiet the sound, in his mind they’re already white-hot — flowing into the hollows he’s carved, chasing every edge. He prays the lead will be enough to thin the alloy, to help it slip like water into every detail.

He must choose the right day. Not too hot, not too cold. A still, dry morning with not a breath of wind. When the conditions align just so, that will be the day when the alloy will take its shape.

He doesn’t look at his father, but he feels the silence stretching between them, growing louder with every step.

He knows his father sees the panel as a move in a larger game — one piece nudging another across the great marble chessboard of Florence. The competition, the guilds, the halls, the judges. It’s all a game to him, he sniffs.

Filippo had once tried to play that game. He had the beginnings of an education in law. But he had found the words to be slippery, truth too easily bent to suit the atmosphere of the room.

Filippo’s hands wanted something solid. His work would speak for itself.

In the distance, a bell strikes two. The sound ringing across the water. The air is sweet with the smell of roasting chestnuts, before the wind whips it away again.

The carts hit a rut and jolt, a low clang rings out, and Filippo flinches, but his father says nothing.

He tries to stay in the ritual — imagining the furnace and the pouring, but his mind drifts, as it always does, to Ghiberti.

The foolish Lorenzo, he thinks, shaking his head. He opens his process to anyone with eyes to see. His studio is a fishbowl, with students, merchants, apprentices all drifting through. Nobody passes Ghiberti’s door without being pulled into some question. “Do you think the angel’s wing should come forward or be tucked behind? Should the hem of this robe follow the wind, or lie still?” Even the baker’s boy weighed in.

A master, Filippo thinks, is one who trusts his own instincts.
A design by committee is no design at all.

The judges will see right through Lorenzo, he thinks, If the judges aren’t fools.

They round a corner and the wind hits them full in the face. Filippo lifts a hand to shield his eyes. Across the Arno, the towers rise pale against a sky that’s beginning to grey. A storm is coming.

He watches his father’s face — stern, composed. A lifetime of restraint etched into every line. He does his thinking behind a face that doesn’t give anything away, never revealing his hand until every variable has been weighed. Twice.

Filippo remembers the early skepticism — the raised brow, when he’d first turned away from the path of law. But over time, as Filippo’s hands learned to shape what others could only imagine, his father’s stance began to ease. A quiet pride in small gestures, never spoken.

His father walks with his hands clasped behind his back. His eyes scan the floor out of habit, noting where the cobblestones have begun to crack.

Filippo doesn’t see the way his father watches him.

Brunellesco looks at his son beside him — taller now, darker around the eyes than he used to be, his clothes worn thin by labour.

He wonders what it must be like — to form an idea and to believe in it so completely that you are willing to pour molten metal into that shape, to let it harden and cool into something final — without ever knowing the future.

He cannot imagine it.

To him, truth is earned through negotiation. It shifts with time, and circumstance, with alliances, and changing winds. It must be tested, weighed, and adjusted. That is the art of the game.

That Antonio and Filippo are two sides of the same coin is plain enough to see. He chuckles softly, imagining how they would both rail against the comparison, but there’s no mistaking it. He shakes his head, his eye catching on one of the handcart’s wheels, in want of repair. Filippo, in pursuit of his perfect forms and radiant truths looks to him just like Antonio, chasing his monks through the holy city, trying to touch the divine.

Both running after absolutes, like boys running after pigeons.

But Brunellesco has seen what youth cannot yet imagine.

He remembers the plague — how quickly he saw ideals turned to ash. The same men who once debated the soul turned to hoarding grain and bribing guards — the finest minds yielding to necessity.

Let the boy live through a plague or two, he thinks, not unkindly, as they near the workshop doors. Then, perhaps, he might see reason.

On a windless morning in April, a man stands outside Filippo’s workshop, forearms slick with sweat, his tunic clinging to his back. Gasping, he cranes his neck skyward, desperately willing a breeze that does not come. His mouth is chalk-dry, face streaked with soot.

The street bustles, but passersby give the workshop a wide berth, as the air around it shimmers with heat, and foul-smelling fumes. With one more deep breath, he pulls the damp cloth back across his face — and steps inside again to join the others.

The crucible glows incandescent. The furnace roars. Inside, the brightness splits the scene into the harsh contrast of white and black.

As the temperature reaches its highest point, iron tongs reach to grip the crucible, slow, steady — tipping.

They brace their legs as the molten metal pours white into the mould — hissing, sending up a wave of heat and smoke. Bronze flares out of the narrow vents, a sign for the men to stop.

With a thud, they lower the crucible and step back.

One by one, the men stagger outside, gasping for sips of air. Others remain, shovelling sand, packing it in layer by layer to slow the cooling — to temper it so it does not crack.

Filippo tastes metal — dry, blood and copper coins. His muscles tremble from the strain, but still he holds steady until the last corner is buried beneath the sand.

Heat still radiates from it, a shimmer rising from beneath the sand, a mirage distorting the air.

Then it’s done.

The men wipe their faces. Coins change hands. They nod, wordless, and leave — desperate to escape the heat.

Hours pass and the furnace, still glowing, begins to dim as it hungers for charcoal spent. From white, it begins to burn yellow, then orange, then with flecked with red.

Long after dinner, Filippo returns. He cannot sleep. In the workshop, the heat clings to the walls. There is nothing here to do, but wait till the bronze is cold. Only then will he know.

Instead, he stands in silence, listening to the tick tick ping — the sound of metal cooling — shifting, uncomfortable in the prickly heat.

At last, he steps outside, the cool night air touching his skin, and lifts his eyes.

Above the workshop, the heat rises in waves, rippling the stars — like silver coins tossed up into the dark wishing pool of the sky.

Evening gathers in the streets and the last of the bells have stopped their ringing.

Livia steps out through the side door of the chapel, pulling her shawl close. The scent of wax and soup clings to her. The night is clear, the stars sharp as arrows against the darkened sky.

Under her arm she carries a stack of empty bowls and plates — the remains of a supper she'd brought earlier for Caterina and Maddalena, who’s mother was sick with fever. She had trimmed the candles for the evening service, checking the wicks.

More than a hundred candles burned, flickering in the chapel, the air thick with prayers and smoke. Her lips moved slightly as she lit one for Beatrice, who had just lost a son. For her husband — may the scales tilt in his favour this time. One for Matteo, who stays late copying ledgers, hoping Signore Bardi will recognise his talent.

And one for Filippo. A pause.

For Donato, and Lupo, and Nato, and Berto — every boy who had helped with the pour.

She didn’t linger.

When she reaches the house, she slips off her shoes at the threshold, and moves quietly through the entryway, setting down the dishes. Bare feet tiptoe past embroidered tapestries and up the weathered steps. The lamps have already been dimmed. No one sees her return.

Her feet are red at the seams where her shoes had been digging all day. In her chamber, she presses her thumbs to release the ache in her arches. Alone, she unpins her hair — the weight of it falling forward as she lowers her head.

She kneels beside the bed, her hands clasped,

This is not a prayer she would speak aloud.

“Sant'Eligio,” she whispers. “Patron saint of goldsmiths, of honest hands and hammer-sparks.”

In her mind, she steps not into the church, but before the Baptistery of San Giovanni — the same space where, on the eighth day, she brought her newborn son, wailing so loudly she thought the marble itself would crack. She chuckles softly in the darkness, thinking that she had never heard a child who screamed like Filippo in that place.

Now, in her mind, she is kneeling, not beside her bed, but with her knees on the cold stone of that sacred floor, and before her, rising, she sees them — all twenty-eight panels. Two columns of seven on each door, gleaming with a kind of internal light.

She throws them open — her arms lifting before her, and into that sacred space, she sends the full force of her plea.

Let the twenty-eight panels be enough.

Let them temper him.
Cool him.
Keep him.
Tether him.

She sees their golden scenes etched like glittering anchors — each one forged in the fire, each one holding a corner of his restless soul.

Twenty for the life of Christ, Four for the ones who told the story of the gospels, and four for the church fathers, who led their sheep. Not one of them could see those panels as clearly as she could — not like a mother.

Let the work be heavy.
Let it slow him.
Let it hold him to Florence.
Let it hold him to us.

Her son.

There is a gap, a hollowed place where hands have clawed and scraped. Beside it, Filippo steadies himself beside the mound of cooling sand. One knee in the dirt, he raises the hammer high above his head.

And he hesitates.

The mould is still warm, the last of its heat rising, fired bisque caked with sand.

The act of revealing is also an act of destruction. To reach the bronze inside, he must destroy the very form that shaped it.

There is no way around this.

The wax, the pouring, the months of preparation. The mould cannot be reused. If the bronze inside is cracked or misshapen, he would have to start again.

From the sketches.

For a moment, he is very still. Then he tightens his grip.

And with force, he brings the hammer down.

The blow lands with a cracking thud.

Hairline fractures spread across its surface. Dust and sand lifts into the air and settles slowly as a copper tang fills the air. Another strike, and another, until the shell begins to break apart. A glint of bronze catches the light and he sets the hammer down.

With bare hands, he pulls apart the crumbling clay, slowly — as if removing the bark to rescue something yet alive.

A fold of cloth. The curve of a wing, and then the boy’s face.

The bronze inside is rough. Dull.
Pocked with tiny bubbles and fine surface scars. Sharp raised edges and a line where the metal cooled too quickly.

Filippo lowers himself, until both knees press into the sand. He runs his calloused hands along every inch of the bronze. His fingertips trace every imperfection. Every pockmarked surface. Every sharp edge. Every flaw.

There is so much work ahead — it will need to be filed smooth, chased and refined. With agate stones and with fine chisels.

He breathes a sigh of relief, as a grin spreads across his face.

It is whole.

Image Credit:
Casa dell'Arte della Seta Coat of Arms in bronze - Florence

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The River Arno splashes in ripples of olive green, like dirty paintwater, lapping merrily against the thick stone arches of the Ponte Vecchio. The street that crosses the water is crammed with shops and the bright sounds of commerce. It is mid-morning, and the bridge heaves with foot traffic — none moving more swiftly than a boy of fifteen, carrying news.

He is lean, with the lightly muscled frame of a sculptor, long brown curls framing a striking sun-bronzed face. He barrels down the street, boots skimming the stone, weaving through the crowd. Around him, the bridge is alive with colour and motion, farmers unloading baskets of figs, fishmongers with silver-scaled catch, and cloth sellers lifting bolts of dyed fabric into the light.

“Why do they move so slowly?” he thinks, frustrated — unaware that it is the swiftness of his own youth that makes the world seem so slow, as if the whole street were wading through honey.

He swerves past a man hefting a sack of flour, sidesteps a mother scolding her child, and nearly collides with an old woman leaning heavily on a walking stick.

“Mi scusi, signora!” he calls, steadying her with a hand on her elbow.

She waves him off with a scowl. He offers her a broad grin — his big brown eyes dancing — before slipping past two men rolling a wine barrel, the wine sloshing with every turn.

At last, the crowd begins to thin.

As he rounds a corner onto a quieter side street, his fingers brush against a block of pale weathered marble set into the wall — a break in the monotony of sandstone. It juts slightly outward, a detail easily missed in motion, cool and solid, steadying him as the sounds of the bridge fall away behind him. He does not notice the faint indentation beneath his thumb where a Latin inscription had once been carved, rubbed smooth by centuries of sand and weather.

He slows only when he reaches the double doors of Filippo’s workshop, and without so much as a knock, he dashes inside.

Inside, the heat wraps around Donato like a blanket.

The air is a thick haze, the sharp smell of burning charcoal rising around the furnace. Filippo, sleeves rolled up to the elbows and flushed from the heat, is working the bellows in a steady rhythm, drawing them wide, pressing them together, fanning the flames higher.

“Pippo!” Donato grins, stepping closer. “Did you hear —?”

But Filippo doesn’t hear him over the roar of the furnace. He is darting towards the open mouth, checking the airflow, his whole body attuned to the flame.

Donato stands back for a moment, taking in the scene — the shimmer of heat, the master at work, and the warm earthy-smell of burnt clay and beeswax. He knows this world well. His own hands are marked with burns and callouses, apprenticed as he is in a workshop farther down the street — the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti.

Donato moves toward the bellows to help.

“Stop,” Filippo calls, laughing as he catches sight of him. “I’ve got it. But thanks, Donato,” he says, slapping his friend on the back. “I thought Ghiberti had you working so hard I wouldn’t see you.”

Donato shrugs, grinning. “I escaped.”

Pointing into the furnace, Donato asks, with some reverence. “Is that it? Your Sacrifice of Isaac?”

Filippo nods, wiping his brow with the back of his wrist. The flames are licking around a hulking mass of clay, a hard shell formed around the wax scene inside.

“I wish I could see it.”

“You’re about to.” Filippo gestures, grinning toward the mould.
For a moment, a flicker of confusion, and then Donato understands the joke and grins.

They both watch as threads of pale amber beeswax begin to seep out, bubbling and then dripping out through small vents in the clay shell. The wax hisses and smokes where it meets the heat, dripping and pooling into a blackened metal pan below, the wax shimmering in the firelight.

“There,” Filippo says, nodding.

Donato scrunches up his nose in mock distaste. “Isaac looks a bit lumpy, don’t you think?”

Filippo beams, proudly, eyes never leaving the mould. “You’ll see when he’s in bronze.”

The two young men stare into the flames, light dancing across their faces. Filippo seeing his image, the sacrifice of Isaac dripping into the pan, and Donato imagining the scene as he knows it — the one that is taking shape in Ghiberti's studio.

The wax and clay enter the fire together. The clay must endure, but the wax will not.

Beneath the clay shell, the same heat that hardens the clay is melting the wax from within. It seeps out leaving behind a hollow that holds the memory in reverse of a scene from scripture, empty, waiting to be filled with molten bronze.

Filippo grabs two pairs of iron tongs — one in each hand — and moving quickly, he steps toward the furnace.

Donato watches closely, his brow furrowing. Without a word, he reaches for another set of tongs, from the wall, clasping them firmly.

Together, they grip the clay form, its surface scorched and weeping. They begin to turn it — slow, deliberate. Grunting with the effort.

“This is not a job for one person, Pippo,” Donato says through clenched teeth. “Why do you insist on doing everything yourself?”

Filippo doesn’t answer.

Donato exhales through his nose, adjusting his grip.

Donato had apprenticed under Ghiberti, in a workshop swarming with hands. Hands to stoke the furnace, to tend the bellows, to shape the clay, to turn the moulds.

Here, there are only two, the roughened hands of Filippo, who carries all the work himself — and whoever happens to be near enough, and stubborn enough, to insist on helping.

They rotate the heavy shell again and again, letting the last ribbons of beeswax drip free. Filippo peers into the vents, checking for smoke, for bubbles. Then, satisfied, he nods toward the drum of sand beside them.

With a practiced rhythm, they carry the mould over to the drum and lower it gently, burying it in the rough sand to temper the cooling.

Filippo exhales, deeply. He wipes his face with the front of his tunic, his hair damp with sweat.

Donato steps back, watching him for a moment — and then remembers.

“I came to tell you, Antonio’s back.”

Filippo’s eyes open wide with surprise, and then narrow with interest.

“He arrived late last night.”

Antonio, the brave fool who had left Florence to see Rome the previous spring — had returned.

Livia’s table is laden.

Tuscan bread, unsalted, sits beside a shallow bowl of glistening olive oil. Blackened onions roasted with vinegar and herbs, thin slices of salted cod, and piles of shaved pecorino, curling at the edges.

Steam rises from the heavy clay pot at the centre of the table, cabbage soup, thickened with white beans, and infused with garlic and rosemary.

She scans the faces around her table.

Her youngest son, Matteo, sits beside her on one side, her husband at the head of the table. Directly across from her, Filippo, her middle son, is flanked by his two companions: The young sculptor, Donato, who is no stranger to her dinner table, and the traveller, Antonio, recently returned after more than a year away.

There is warmth in the room, and the sounds of shared laughter — but what pleases her most is seeing Filippo, usually so serious, looking light and animated.

Antonio eats heartily — tearing off great hunks of bread, gulping wine, and answering questions between noisy slurps of soup.

He still looks travel-weary from the road, but scrubbed clean — thankfully, she notes. Though she can’t quite tell if his glow is from the washtub, or the relief of returning home. It has been well over a year since he had supped with them last, and he looks different now. At his age, a year can do much to change a face. But it isn’t only that. There is something else. A new kind of intensity.

Livia beams at the boys around her table.
At her side, Matteo sits coolly, holding himself in check, observing the traveller like a distant curiosity, a puzzle he’s not quite sure he wants to solve.

Antonio spoons more soup into his bowl, then leaning back in his chair, he launches into his story.

There’s a rehearsed quality to it, Livia can tell. He has the cadence of someone who’s already told it a dozen times, though he’s only been home a few days.

“The Jubilee,” he says, drawing the word out slowly, and with reverence, his eyes scanning his tiny audience.

Every year, pilgrims travelled to Rome, but never in such great numbers as for the Jubilee in 1400. They had followed the Via Francigena — the ancient road winding south, four weeks on foot — hundreds of them together, their sandals wearing thin over the long journey. Monks in travel-stained robes leading the way, walking in prayer and song. They carried their bedrolls on their backs, slept in monasteries and hospices along the road.

And then, at last, they arrived — footsore, dust-streaked and travel-worn — at the gates of the eternal city, the city of the Pope.

“A journey that cleanses the soul,” Antonio says in an awed whisper, trailing off.

Then his voice brightening.

“I wish that you could have seen it, the Ponte Sant'Angelo, flooded with pilgrims. So many people they formed a great river, split in two — one flowing in, pilgrims weary with the dust. Another flowing out, their souls scrubbed clean, and their faces shining.”

Antonio lets the image hang in the air.

Livia raises her goblet to her mouth to hide her wry smile. “That’ll explain it then,” she thinks. She looks to her husband, who has the furrowed brow of someone already planning his exit, but Filippo and Donato are leaning in with interest.

Antonio goes on.

He speaks of Saint Peter’s tomb. Of the bronze statue worn smooth by the kisses of the faithful. He speaks of praying over the bones of the martyrs, of touching the blackened links of the chains that had once held Saint Peter. Of the Pope’s seat — pale white marble patterned with terracotta and emerald stone inserts, empty — and plain, really — against all the gold leaf glittering around it.

And of the Pope himself, when they saw him, giving the blessing ‘Urbi et Orbi’ — to the city and to all the world.

Livia watches him closely. Watches the way the others lean in.

She hates that she feels this way, but the longer Antonio talks, the more uneasy she becomes. He has barely shaken the dust from his tunic, and already she can see him filling the room with the scent of the road, and she can see the effect he’s having on Filippo and Donato both, filling their heads with dreams of Rome — that lawless city.

With the soup growing cold, Livia rises, steadying with hands on the table, and excuses herself to the kitchen. From the pantry, she can hear their muffled voices. She gathers a heap of figs, halving them to expose their fleshy insides, adding a sprinkle of walnuts. Looking around, she chooses a pretty dish and begins slicing an apple into thin wedges.

In the dining room, Donato’s eyes sparkle with a question. His voice light, he asks: “Did you bring back any sketches?

“Oh, Yes,” Antonio reaches into his satchel, producing a small bundle of parchment, the pages worn, yellowed and rustling in his hand.

Donato reaches for them eagerly. “You sketched these yourself?” He asks, leaning forward on an elbow. “Do you have any drawings of the Pantheon?”

Antonio nods, pointing to a rough charcoal sketch. He runs a finger along the hint of a semicircle. “You can see the Pantheon in the distance — there” Reaching for his wine, he adds “That’s where Saint Peter — the very first Martyr, had been strung up and crucified upside down, not allowed the honour of —”

“ — Did you get inside?” Filippo interrupts, excitedly, “Did you see the Oculus?” his eyes scanning the sketch for clues. Then he flushes, ashamed. “Forgive me, Antonio,” and he shrugs.

Antonio waves it off, his smile tightening. “We did go inside,” he says “We prayed there —for Saint Peter” He pauses.

Something in his tone has changed, a flicker of disappointment crossing his face.

Matteo and his father having drifted into a soft conversation of their own, now begin trailing out of the room, entering the study, the door clicking shut behind them.

Donato finds a place where the parchment has folded over, and tries to straighten it out. “Just imagine, Pippo,” he whispers. “A dome so strong, it doesn’t even need to be closed — leaving a hole in the top, just because they could.” He chuckles, drawing a little halo in the air with his fingers, eyes widening.

Filippo laughs “As if they had meant to taunt Florence.” His eyes slanting towards the dome just beyond the iron grate — the lack of a dome, rather — except Filippo could sometimes see it, a red rose riding high above the rooftops. He could see it now.

Filippo looks to his father’s empty seat and then back to Antonio. “Do you have more sketches? Of the ruins?”

Antonio shrugs, irritated now “We passed them. The are ruins are everywhere. But we didn’t linger there.” His jaw tightens.

“You mean they warned you not to look too closely,” Filippo says, eyes narrowing, “In the Guild, we hear all about the accomplishments of Rome, they sing her praises, but when it comes to the actual measurements?” A sigh. “Rome sits in the sand, with her knowledge crumbling to dust and not one brave enough to dirty their hands.”

“Measurements?” Antonio spitting out the word, shifting in his seat. “They built idols, Filippo,” he hisses. “There is nothing to learn from them except vanity.”

“You sat in her churches, Antonio — did you not know that the stones beneath your knees were Roman?”

Antonio grows quiet. His words faltering. He sees it clearly now: He had mistaken the look in their eyes. They do not hunger for salvation — but only for ruin. These two did not invite him here to speak of relics or prayers, or pilgrims, or even the Holy Pope.

His jaw tightens.

The Ancient Romans had left behind their ruins — fragments of once-perfect forms. And Florence, unable to match her in skill, had instead dismissed her brilliance as excess, her mastery as idolatry. They deemed her too beautiful — technically perfect but spiritually empty.

The guilds, the scholars, the fathers of Florence — they had all agreed that the Rome of antiquity had flown far too close to the sun, and that this must surely have been the reason for her downfall: That the wax points holding her wings intact had melted, and along with bits of wing floating to the ground, so too came the Romans as they fell, tumbling into the earth.

And yet, every year, the builders of Florence would unearth her — Rome — in shards. Each time they turned the soil to lay new foundations, they found her again: in old marble columns, Latin words worn smooth by time.

Had they forgotten? That Florence herself was once Florentia, — a colony built on the bones of Rome, her marble fragments, glittering idols in the sand.

“You call Rome Icarus,” Filippo says, more quietly now. “But tell me, Antonio — do we not all strain for beauty?”

Unconsciously, he had lifted a calloused hand — past the open grate, to where the cathedral waits, unfinished, the proudest of them all. She waits, a ruin even before her completion.

Donato, desperate to lighten the mood, tries: “Well, I suppose we’ll be quoting Cicero before dessert.” He chuckles weakly.

Livia, returning with her apple slices, splayed out on a pretty plate, with the halved figs and walnuts, stands frozen in the doorway. “Well,” she says wryly, “it seems the conversation has livened up somewhat since I left.”

She places the fruit heavily, at the center of the table, glancing once more at her son, before settling back into her seat.

Somewhere, four weeks south of them by foot, a pale circle of moonlight falls through the oculus of the Pantheon — a searchlight through her aperture, the moon by night and the sun by day, casting around her hollow dome for the place where Saint Peter was said to have been crucified — not finding it. Still searching.

Image Credit:
Room 44 Mosaic pavement of cockfight victory House of the Labyrinth Pompeii, Mosaikausschnitt, Roman Villas in Karthago, 1st century CE

Through a narrow sliver between the workshop’s double doors, the street passes by in fragments. A swish of skirts, a basket swinging from the crook of an elbow, little boys shrieking as they chase pigeons, a pair of builders balancing a length of timber between them, calling out warnings to the crowd ahead. Apprentices dashing between workshops. Each, just a glimpse, and then gone again.

Filippo does not look up.

Up and down the street in the goldsmiths’ quarter the workshops have their doors thrown wide. It is the custom in Florence — an invitation to trade, but also, a signal to the guild. An open door means we keep no secrets, no slipping a little bit of gold into the pocket, or swapping a sapphire out for tinted glass. Passersby drift in and out, making conversation, watching artisans at work.

But farther up the street, where it begins to narrow, Filippo has drawn his doors to only a crack, enough to observe the guild’s law — but not an inch more.

The street outside is too bright, too loud, too garish, his clay scene too soft and malleable. He is shielding it from the sharpness of the world. His workshop doors dampen the harsh sunshine, the shrill burst of laughter, the barked command, the clink of hammers on tempered steel from a workshop nearby.

Inside, the air is cool and thick with the scent of damp clay, the furnace cold. Light spills through the crisscross of the iron grill above the door, casting a patterned square that inches across the terracotta tiles with the afternoon sun.

A fly buzzes past his ear. He swats it away, without looking up.

Filippo leans in, his whole body curved forward, a patch of sweat blooming on his tunic between two broad shoulder blades.

He is here, hunched in his workshop, carving every detail into the soft clay — the woolly fleece of the ram, the fine feathers on the angel’s wing. In moments, he can almost see the small chest of Isaac, rising and falling in short, shallow gasps.

A steady clip of boots on cobblestone abruptly stops. A knock. Four neat taps against the door, and then it creaks open. Filippo raises his hand to shield his eyes from the sudden brightness, squinting. He cannot make out the features of the person in the doorway — a man, he thinks — shot through with beams of light among rising dust particles catching the sun. The visitor pauses for a moment longer, taking in the rough-looking Filippo, unshaven and dishevelled, then with mumbled apology, they push the doors back to where they had been before, revealing the same sliver of the now-empty street.

Filippo finally shifts, his movements slow and stiff, stretching and looking about the room.

On his workbench, the parchments pile high with charcoal studies, a paper trail from weeks spent chasing the composition, each revision pulled tighter, to fit within the constraints of the gothic cloverleaf base — the quatrefoil. It’s a difficult shape to work with. He had coaxed the story within its frame, like a shepherd guiding sheep.

In the corner of the table: a plate of olives, a hunk of bread, a thin slice of cured meat, all congealing in a puddle of grease. The crust has gone hard. Two flies drone in lazy circles as a goblet of wine sits, untouched.

Filippo turns back to the scene in clay. A fold of Abraham’s flowing robes catches his eye — it hasn't caught the wind just yet. He leans in again.

The Arno glints, rippling in the morning light, as pale sparse clouds stretch wide across the sky, their edges touched with pink. On the far bank, a flat-bottomed barge is ferrying a heap of fleeces, another is unloading barrels of olive oil. The boatmen steer with long poles, calling to one another, their voices echoing strangely over the water.

Filippo walks beside his younger brother, Matteo, in the quiet of morning. He notices Matteo walks a little taller these days. Since taking up his post as an apprentice to a civic official, his voice has taken on a crisp, assured tone — one that Filippo hadn’t noticed before.

Matteo speaks of committee meetings, held in vaulted rooms, with frescoed ceilings and marbled floors, where men debate trade routes and guild regulations. He talks of agendas and policy and civic duty. He has developed a fondness for procedure now.

Filippo listens, but his thoughts are elsewhere. In such rooms, he imagines, he would spend more time studying the ceilings than any debates taking place beneath them.

Matteo had taken the path that their father had dreamed for his sons, of law and rhetoric and public service. And Filippo is glad, truly glad, that it suits Matteo so well.

It would never have suited him.

They arrive at the steps of the Palazzo, where Matteo is due to attend a public address. At the top, a small group of gentlemen gather, their robes, heavy with status and fingers bright with golden rings.

Filippo steps back, studying Matteo from the base of the stairs. He watches the way he smooths his sleeves of his coat. He sees the invisible pull as Matteo is drawn toward the conversation above, a subtle nod of recognition. He places one boot on the first step, then turns back to face him.

A nod is exchanged between brothers, a silence full of things left unsaid. Then Matteo turns, climbing the stone stairs. Filippo lingers a moment longer, lifting his gaze to see how Matteo is framed by the carved stone arches above the doorway. A figure already halfway into the world above.

Filippo turns.

The sun has cleared the rooftops now as he makes his way to the goldsmith’s quarter. The sounds of industry gather, hooves striking cobblestones, the glorious ring of hammer on metal.

A world that makes sense to his hands.

Back in his workshop, the clay has hardened. It is ready.
He rolls up his sleeves, hands twitching with anticipation.

There is work to be done.

Filippo arranges a handful of charcoal in the smaller furnace. He doesn’t need much heat. It catches slowly, releasing a faint, bitter scent of carbon as the coals begin to glow.

Then he places a small lump of golden beeswax into a metal pot, watching as it softens, then melts, turning liquid as a warm, honeyed, scent rises.

When it swirls clear, he dips his brush and returns to the scene in clay. Carefully, delicately, he paints the surface, coating each rise and hollow, sealing every detail beneath a hardening skin of pale ochre wax.

There will be no more revisions now. The scene is sealed in wax. Filippo walks to the workshop doors and throws them open wide, letting the sunlight, the noise, and the life of the street spill in.

Image Credit:
’The Ponte Vecchio, Florence,’ 1745, Oil on canvas by Bernardo Bellotto. From the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

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Dear readers,
These historical chapters are a little heavier in the research than I expected, so I’m not quite moving at the pace I had hoped. Chapter Seven: The Edge of a Guilded Knife will continue over a few more installments to come. The next installment, ‘Chapter Seven: The Edge of a Guilded Knife III’ is coming next week.

Not far from the cathedral, in the wealthy quarter where the bankers and silk merchants live, a single room still flickers with light. The candles are burning low, dripping shallow pools of wax into the brass bellies of a pair of candlestick holders. A soft amber glow spills out across a writing desk strewn with parchment.

Thick velvet tapestries hang on the walls, richly embroidered with pomegranates and vine leaves, their curling edges picked out in gold thread.

Pacing in front of the writing desk is a young man of twenty-four. His features are plain, hardened by labour, and tipped with a fury too restless for sitting.

He does not seem to belong in such a room as this. He looks misplaced among its fine finishings, though this is the room of his childhood. His hands are rough and calloused, bearing stains that have seeped so far into the skin that it would be impossible to wash them out.

His boots tell a similar story, worn thin, and dusted with soot and ash, scuffing the terracotta floor tiles with every turn — agitated, as Filippo replays the same moment again and again.

He paces.

The judges. The verdict. The outstretched hand.
That look of smugness on Lorenzo’s face.

He cannot let it go.

Just beyond the cathedral steps stands the Baptistery of San Giovanni, an octagonal stone building older than the cathedral herself, clad in the same striped patterning of green and white marble.

Like every child born in Florence, Filippo had been carried through the Baptistery’s ancient doors on the Sunday after his birth, swaddled and wailing in protest, baptised in water drawn from the Arno, and given his name.

Now he was a man, grown. Trained as a goldsmith and a clockmaker.

In the heat of the previous summer, 1401, the silk merchants had announced a grand commission. A new set of doors for the north side of the Baptistery. And they were to be adorned with twenty-eight gleaming panels, all depicting scenes from scripture, cast in bronze and guilded with shining gold.

To a goldsmith, it was everything, a commission that would define a career, and for Filippo, it had arrived at precisely the right moment. He was no longer just a promising apprentice, he was gaining recognition for his skill. Imagine it, every merchant, artist, every barefoot babe and dignitary, pausing beneath those doors, their eyes resting on stories told through his hand. Hands that might be remembered for decades.
Centuries, perhaps.

There had been a competition.

Seven artists stepped forward with Filippo among their number, each one trained as a goldsmith under Florence’s Arte della Seta guild. Each charged with the same task: to depict a scene from the Old Testament — the Sacrifice of Isaac — in guilded bronze.

The winner would be awarded the entire project, all twenty-eight panels. The commission of a lifetime.

At twenty-three, brimming with talent and skill and restless purpose, Filippo had thrown himself into the work.

It would take over a year to design and render the scene.

Before Filippo would pick up his charcoal to make the first sketch, he read the story again and again, studying the Latin texts in their fine calligraphy until the feelings lodged in him like a stone and he ached with the grief of it.

The scene haunts him still.

The boy, Isaac, discovers too late what his father intends. He opens his mouth to protest, but it comes out in a garbled wail. Abraham’s arms ripple with the strain, his robes whipping in the wind atop the rocky Mount Moriah. The knife glints in his hand, his grip, iron, his expression, unreadable — his eyes are fixed on his son, but seeming to look through him, to something else, out of the reach of reason.

The boy with gritted teeth, cowers, shielding himself against the blow, his eyes shut tight and streaming.

No, that's not it. We need to see his face.

The father's hand wraps around Isaac’s pale throat, the boy’s knees buckling on the altar built for sacrificing sheep, already bloodied, the knife already touching skin.

Isaac strains to look up, away from the blade, and sees above him, uncomprehending, his father’s eyes, crazed and wild, now locked on something else.

Something brilliant, feathered, a hand reaching out to stay the hand that slays.

But Abraham’s left arm would hide the knife’s edge from our view. Does the angel reach him in time to spare the dutiful son who tended to the sheep and carried water, asking no questions, obeying his father?

The bronze will never say.

Filippo will leave the scene suspended in bronze, a question to be answered only by one who has heard the story and knows the ending.

That's the way.

Gently, Filippo reaches for a stick of charcoal. Carefully, as if not to disturb the image in his mind’s eye, holding the scene lightly as if gripping it too tightly will make the angel, Michael to turn his head, missing his chance to save the boy.

Image Credit:
Johan Carl Loth - , circa 1600, drawing, ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The rain is falling heavily over Florence. Fat drops strike the terracotta roof tiles, cascading, and tumbling from the eaves above onto the cobbled streets below. Water gathers in the grooves between cobblestones, twisting into silver ribbons that race through the narrow streets, downhill toward the wide river Arno.

Most of Florence’s inhabitants are dry, behind wooden shutters, or huddled beneath stone arches, waiting out the worst of it. But two young boys are running through the downpour, their tunics soaked and clinging, curls plastered to their foreheads, braided belts jostling with every footfall. Each boy carries a bundle of tools wrapped in waxed canvas, but today they serve only to weigh them down.

They have come too far to turn back now.

Rounding a corner, they burst onto the city square, and all at once she rises before them — the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, her patterned walls shining like wet silk. The storm-deepened sky casts the white marble in faint turquoise, drawing out the green stone details as if she had just emerged from an underwater scene.

The two boys push open the heavy doors and step out of the storm.

For a moment, they are on the edge of shared laughter in the giddy relief of escaping the cold rain, but the vastness of the grand interior, imposing, presses them back into silence.

Inside, the cathedral is mostly empty. The heavy wooden doors groan shut behind them, sealing them off from the roar of the rain, now muffled to a distant whisper. They step slowly forward, rainwater pooling at their feet as they place their bundles gently beside the doors.

On either side, the tall stained-glass windows turn the storm’s deep blues and greys into the softest hints of amber and sage, rose and lilac, the colours changing with the light. The boys begin to make their way across the vast nave in silence, stone arches throwing shadows across the cavernous space.

The younger wipes at the nape of his neck, where a raindrop tickles him, his fingers still stained green from grinding malachite into pigment, for the painters.

The older, Piero, notices first, that their shadows have split, fanning out around them like the segments of an orange. He whispers to the younger, Niccolò, pointing. Two eyebrows lift in amazement as the younger boy looks around him, his face widening into a wonderous grin. Lifting his arms, he begins to spin around clumsily, feet stumbling across the patterned tiles, making the shadows whirl around him.

A burst of laughter escapes from Niccolò, sudden and bright, his head tipping back, the sound echoing around the room. But when he looks around, he sees that Piero has already moved onward, so he abruptly halts, teetering, patchwork tiles spinning for a moment longer, before he turns, racing to fall back into step with his older brother.

They are halfway to the altar now — two tiny figures adrift in a sea of endless marble, cold beneath the thin soles of their boots.

And then they can hear it in the distance, the continuous heavy slap of rain striking stone, getting louder now, echoing.

Directly ahead, where the transept cuts from left to right across the nave, and the lines of the cathedral meet, a curtain of rain falls in long, vertical threads, as if heaven were pouring itself directly into the earth.

Piero knows this is the place where any other cathedral would carry a dome of masonry, but he has only ever known this one — where the great mouth of Santa Maria del Fiore stands open to the sky, receiving the storm.

The air is cooler here, and the light has changed, too — stormlight spilling across the wet marble, in deep shifting shades of blue.

The boys step carefully now, deliberate. Niccolò inches forward, his boots slipping slightly as he leans just far enough to glimpse a crescent of storm-dark sky. The cold wind swirls, whistling faintly as it echoes off stone. Already, he can feel the fine spray on his legs, and he hangs back, shivering.

Piero stands before a silver veil of rain, his mouth pressed into a hard line. He draws a breath, bracing himself, then pushes through the cold shock. Niccolò watches his brother’s form vanish, becoming a vague silhouette, barely visible through the silver.

Rain lashes at Piero, shocking and clean. He shivers, walking on — ten steps, then twenty. The space is larger than it seems. He presses on until he is far out into the open heart of the cathedral.

They say the dome must be covered — everyone says it — but Piero can't imagine it, a space this wide, covered in masonry. More than that, he wonders why go to all that trouble, to build an impossible vault and paint it with angels when he can look up, now, and see straight into the heavens. Lifting his face to the sky, rainwater stings at his face, striking to blur his vision. He wipes his eyes, looking up again into the clouds above, churning, and heaving in a cauldron of grey.

“Perhaps a dome might be better” he thinks.

Grinning now, he turns, looking back towards his brother, but can’t see him through the thick curtain of rain. He calls out, but his words are washed away.

Piero heads back, now, shoulders hunched, blinking against the wet. The boys collect their tools by the door and later, when the downpour subsides, they slip back out into the square.

Behind them, the great cathedral remains.

She has stood like this for more than a hundred years — complete but for an open sky for a dome, since before their parents’ parents were born.

Imagine the rivers of rain she has swallowed, only to pour them back into the streets, racing to join the Arno again.

All across Italy, cathedrals had been rising — in Pisa, Siena, and Milan.

And Florence, never one to be outdone, had set out to build a cathedral worthy of her status. The dream had begun more than a century before. Her foundations were Gothic, the first stone laid in 1296. And stone by stone, she had been rising.

Then came the plague.

In 1348, the Black Death swept through Florence like wildfire, tearing through the streets in the span of a single season. Between the months of March and July —
that summer when the bells would not cease their tolling for the dead — half the city was gone.

Work slowed, and then stopped entirely. For a time, it seemed the city might never recover. But Florence did what she always does — she endured.

Now it is 1401.

The nave is finished, the tiles are laid, and light streams in through the coloured glass.
And at the heart stands an octagonal drum — eight sides of white and patterned marble, waiting to be crowned with the greatest dome the world has ever seen.

But somewhere in a back room, even the model’s dome has collapsed — a bad omen.

And still, she waits.

This is not a question of money.
Florence is wealthy, prosperous, and powerful. Her influence stretches across Europe.

Flying buttresses could do the job — but they are not the way of Tuscany. A row of crutches lined up along the outside? That might do for the French, or the Germans, perhaps. But Florence remembers her Roman ancestry, her lines are to be clean, and elegant. No external braces to support her from the outside. No internal arches to interrupt the perfect roundness of the choir vault on the inside.

She would rather be perfect and unfinished
than compromised now.

Instead, she would be like an old maid who has sent all her suitors away.

There is another problem, too.

A dome must be supported as it is built — held by a great wooden arch of scaffolding, bearing its weight until the structure, built, can bear itself. But to build a dome of this size would require a mountain of timber scaffolding. If they felled every tree in Tuscany, it still would not be enough.

The city moves around her, the wool merchants and goldsmiths, painters and sculptors, bankers and architects, all going about their work.

But now and then, when someone asks a question:

“Have the merchants had any trouble reaching Cairo with all this weather?”
“Do you think the price of wool will hold through the winter?”

Just for a moment, their eyes slip upward, unconsciously, up to the unfinished drum, floating above the terracotta roofs.

As if the answer might be there, found suspended in the negative space.

The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore waits, her shape too vast to complete with the tools of the day, or the thinking they’ve inherited.

She is waiting, instead for a new kind of thought to arise.

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Image Credit:
Stained glass windows by Andrea del Castagno at Santa Maria del Fiore

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I step out of the coffee shop onto Terrace Street. The steep slope tips me forward, as warm light glints off the windows of Wellington’s modest office blocks. Pōhutukawa trees line the street, their crimson blooms bristling like pincushions, catching in the warm afternoon light.

I’m in my summer staples: a floral blouse, casual jeans, and sensible shoes, my handbag slung over one shoulder. In long, easy strides, I let gravity carry me downhill toward Woodward Street, where I’ll slip into the bustle of Lambton Quay and catch my bus home.

I arrive to find Carl in the yard, pumping up his mountain bike tires. He’s dressed in his riding gear — all in black; shorts and knee-guards.

“I’m going for a ride with Chris,” he says, and then he glances up at the sky, as if gauging how much daylight he has left.

At street level, Wellington seems to be a city pressed flush against the harbour — but as you climb into the hills, it quickly turns wild. Forests take over, with tramping tracks and biking trails, ridgelines and footpaths threaded like pale veins through the green. Wellington belongs to the bikers and trail runners above — the adventurous of spirit, who catch only fleeting glimpses of the city as it sinks into the valleys below.

Carl is buzzing around me, making trips to the car, carrying his bike, grabbing his helmet, his water bottle, a snack from the kitchen. I see him off and then I close the door behind me, to silence.

And in the abrupt stillness, it lands on me again — that single thought that always seems to hover nearby, waiting for me in the quiet:

I have an essay to write.
The Impressionists won’t leave me be.

I fix myself a mug of coffee and sink into the couch.

An idea is a beautiful thing. Pure and weightless, it doesn’t yet live in three-dimensional space, where it might crack, warp or crumple under pressure. It floats, unbound by the laws of physics, unbothered by time, and unconstrained by the limits of possibility.

This is why the first step is always so hard. Because the moment you start building the dream, the illusion must shatter.

I take out an old tin geometry set, and pick out the short, clear plastic ruler. I draw a clean pencil line from left to right across the page.

This is the timeline.

Traditional arts on the left: Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism.

Modernism on the right: Impressionism, and all the other "isms" that followed in its wake: Cubism and Surrealism.

In roughly the middle of the line, I press down, marking a moment in the timeline that seems to draw my attention above all else. It’s a turning point of my story — the Salon des Refusés in Paris, in the early summer of 1863.

I imagine them:

A crowd gathers outside the Palais de l’Industrie, its grand stone façade rising above the banks of the Seine. They’re dressed in their Parisian best, fanning themselves, shading their eyes from the mid-morning sun. The air is humid, the crowd full of restless energy, curious and murmuring.

Each year, the Académie des Beaux-Arts presents its finest artworks at the Institut de France, a short carriage ride away from here. But the pile of rejections has been growing year by year — thousands of entries.

And now, for the first time, the public has been invited to see what’s been hidden from them — a special exhibition to showcase all the artworks that had been refused by the Académie.

The Salon des Refusés.

The crowd forms a line that wraps around the building, lining up to view what was deemed ‘unfit’ — paintings that defied the rules of proportion, works with brushstrokes that are too visible, too unrealistic—too expressive.

A woman stands in the queue, parasol in a gloved hand. She stares across the river Seine, looking faintly amused. She is already scoffing at the idea of the paintings that she will see inside, though she hasn’t seen them yet. She knows what ‘good’ art looks like and “this is not it,” she is preparing to say. A man near the front scans the posters, looking for names he might recognise. Another peers upward at the wide entrance of the building, wondering what sort of art could be so wrong—so dangerous, that it had to be hidden from public view.

It’s fun to open a history book and see the players take their positions and play out a story of what happened long ago. A symphony of logical steps & neat progressions, as if the people of the past knew the choreography by heart.

As if it was all inevitable.

I reach over to take a sip of my coffee and take a bite of an oaty digestive biscuit, crumbs falling into my lap. I pick out the crumbs and place them on a little plate beside me.

My notch in the timeline sits alone.

I add another, just a fingertip’s space to the left, 25 years earlier.

If my first notch was for the artists, this one is for the camera:

It’s Paris again, in the spring of 1838.

From an open window, a camera stands fixed on a windowsill, a large wooden box with ornate brass fittings, looking out on the boulevard below.

It’s just after 8am, and the city bustles with horses and carts that clatter over the cobblestones, street vendors calling out, and people streaming along the sidewalks, hurrying to work.

The camera is silently working, a sliver of light entering through a tiny aperture, projecting the scene outside onto a light-sensitive plate of polished silver. For six long minutes, the camera watches, as the silver plate gradually absorbs the light, burning an image, faint at first, then growing stronger.

When the photograph is finally developed, the street in the picture appears empty, though the street outside is still bustling. The crowds had places to get to, moving quickly, their forms passing like ghosts — the lens forgetting them.

But look again and you’ll see two figures, small, in the lower left corner. One man stands, his boot propped on a platform. Another crouches before him, a cloth in his hand. A shoe-shiner and his client, frozen in place long enough to become real.

This is the first known photograph of a person. Two of them. The street had been full that morning — but only these two stayed still long enough to leave a mark.

These two pencil notches perch side-by-side on my timeline, and then more descending, like birds coming to land on a telephone wire.

Drawing a straight line is easy enough.

It’s only when I start pouring the story in, that it begins to swell, bulging outward like wet clay. The essay, once so elegant in my mind, begins to groan.

For every detail I add to my timeline, a voice: “Not only that. Don’t tell half-truths.”

It wasn’t just the camera, it didn’t arrive alone. It came alongside the factories, the railways, the Industrial Revolution.

It was Darwin, scribbling On the Origin of Species. Freud, cracking open the psyche. It was the atom. The telegraph. The revolution.

A thousand things, all at once.

All of it pushing us inward, in toward a different way of seeing the world.

But what were they pushing off from? What was the shape of the world they were leaving behind?

“The essayist is a liar,” I smirk, “because he knows the arguments for and against his case, but he will not hand them over.

He arrives with an agenda and it may be for good or ill, but he cannot paint you a full picture, because the medium itself is limited.

So he reaches for a sewing needle, and through its narrow eye, he tells you only the details that line up perfectly with his point.”

I laugh at myself.

This is my excuse, of course, for the fact that my first draft is reaching 8000 words and makes no sense. It also explains why last week’s laundry isn’t folded, there’s a pile of dishes in the sink and my coffee is cold.

But still — I must tell you about the Renaissance.

I scribble three words that capture the spirit of the Renaissance.

Order, beauty, knowledge.

I let them ring like a bell in my ear.

But as I look at them on the page, they look somehow hollow, flat and empty.
I am constructing a cardboard cutout of the Renaissance — one that will fall over as soon as the wind blows.

If I want to paint you the turning point with all its colour and drama, I must first paint you a Renaissance that makes you want to tip headfirst into it. She must capture your heart before we tear her down.

She must protest — or the whole story loses its meaning.

I keep adding more, hoping that the details will bring it to life, but the more I pour in, the more it reads like a textbook.

And I hear Mrs Collette’s voice echoing in my head:
“Thumbs, Tara, Too heavy in the thumbs.”

I look at what I’ve written — the sprawling mess of it.

I highlight all the text, pause,

and click delete.

The cursor blinks at me from a page that’s suddenly clean, crisp and white.

It blinks at me, expectant.

The light in the living room is dimming now. Evening has crept in, unnoticed. I move through the rooms turning on lights and drawing the curtains closed — feeling defeated.

Then I return to my laptop.

This time, from a blank page, I start planning, a short, simple piece about making space for fragile ideas. About granting yourself permission. About how the creative process is often real and ugly and messy — and that’s okay.

It was my attempt to offer a kind of bone-deep permission to the reader — to start anyway. I thought I was writing it for someone else.

But what I didn’t know then was that the person I was giving permission to, was me.

The tiles underfoot are parquet, laid in small interlocking squares of wood. I’m running to fetch Granny’s reading glasses — the ones with the pink frames — so she can read the article my mom is pointing to in a magazine.

The couches are brown, the curtains, the crochet tablecloths, the walls are all shades of cream, yellowed by years of cigarette smoke.

In the corner of the room, a delicious monster leans up the wall, its leaves huge and glossy, as if it had grown straight out of a storybook.

Ryan and I are hanging over the back of the couch, now, peering out through the verandah window at the street outside. The bougainvillea spills out across the eaves, framing the view in green and bursts of bright magenta. The game is simple - we’re guessing the colour of the next car that will pass — and the one after that: Blue. Red. White.

Returning to the Casio keyboard which is balanced on the round dining table, I play ‘Groovy Kind of Love’ by Phil Collins. I try to play it softly, but Granny turns the volume right up, the notes spilling out, loud and tinny, from the plastic speakers.

She’s perched on the single-seater couch, her oversized pink t-shirt skimming her knees. Turned toward me, she is listening attentively, her blue-veined bare feet tucked beneath her as she rocks gently from side to side, to the time of my moving ballad, her chin lifted, lips puckered in exaggerated expression of delight.

I’m playing with the fingers of a child, one finger at a time, clunky — every note emphasised. I reach the end of the chorus, then play the verse again. Then the chorus. Round and round. I don’t know how to end it — so I stop abruptly.

Granny swoons and claps, enthusiastically.

“You play with such feeling!” she says.

I beam.

“Would you like some apple pie?” she asks. “I’ve got ice cream.”

Later, when we’re leaving — “before the traffic,” my mom insists — we begin our dance. It’s like this every time.

Granny says, “You must take some pea soup. I’ve got a container in the freezer — take the big one.”

“Ryan, this jacket will fit you. A little big in the shoulders, but you’ll grow into it.”

“Tara, don’t you want to take these magazines? I’ve read them all — I don’t need them.”

“Oh! The apple pie — there’s far too much. You must take some apple pie.”

Arms laden, we hug her goodbye, uncomfortable now, arms full of everything Granny has to give us — things she simply must give us, all of it pressed into our arms.

Her urgency is insistent. I laugh, because I do not understand it, that insistence. It’s as if she wants to give herself to us, in this tub of pea soup, in this slice of apple pie.

We eventually leave Granny's house in the thick of rush hour. My mom rests both hands on top of the steering wheel as we inch forward, pressed in among a sea of brake lights — the cars heading home from work. The car is quiet now, but in my lap, a warm slice of apple-pie — a grandmother’s love wrapped in cling film.

Before humans developed language, everything they learned stayed trapped inside their own skulls, and when they died, it all died with them.

How to sharpen a stick without driving splinters into your fingertips. How to notice the way birds circled differently when there was an injured zebra nearby.

Without language, none of it could be passed on.

But once we found ways to speak, the thread began to carry from one to another. It was still a fragile thing, easily broken — but at least now, it could be carried.

I am trying to give you a slice of my heart.
It’s full of beautiful paintings and music and poetry, and half-formed thoughts — looping into strange, and beautiful shapes.

Please take some.
I can’t hold it all on my own.

I am at my laptop again. This time, I’m collecting paintings — examples from each era.

I find myself reaching for the strongest examples — the classics — because they communicate the spirit of their movements so clearly. But theirs is only part of the story.

There are so many more: artists whose work doesn’t neatly represent the movement they’re in, or whose style was entirely their own, or hard to categorise.

If you only see the classics, it seems as though the pool of art is shallower than it is. But we’re swimming in art.

I look up from my computer screen, glancing around the room. White walls, light grey curtains, a light grey couch. No paintings adorn my walls. The palette is safe and minimal — It doesn’t make any bold statements.

I start to think about all the artworks that I can’t tell you about because there’s only so much space in an essay — just a thimbleful.

Then I begin to think about the artworks that I couldn’t tell you about because they have been lost in wars and fires, and floods.

And more than that — the ones that were never shared at all. How many artists cowered under their brilliance, afraid of being mocked? How many without access to the right connections? How many women overlooked?

History remembers the winners, the risk-takers, the lucky, the sure, and throws out the rest without ceremony.

And the ones who try to pour every drop of themselves into their project until the thing collapsed.

How many artworks lost to fires, I wonder — and how many times it was the artist themselves who struck the match.

If only there were a room — a kind of Salon des Refusés for the lost and the overlooked. A place where all of our forgotten works of art were stacked high, frame upon frame, leaning against the walls, waiting. And that we could demand to see them.

I’d queue for days, to see that exhibition. I’d go looking for something I recognise. Something dimly remembered — maybe even something of my own.

It is here that I am sitting, among the fragments now. An essay in ruins.

And maybe, there is no more fitting place from which to tell you the story of Florence — and the birth of the Renaissance — than here, among the fragments of something failed, and broken.

After all, the Renaissance herself was born, beneath an open sky, among the ruins of a lofty ambition.

Image Credits:
Théodore Rousseau, circa 1852, The Edge of the Woods at Monts-Girard, Fontainebleau Forest, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, Daguerreotype. Made in 1838 by inventor Louis Daguerre

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I twist the pithy core of a yellow pepper out over the sink and watch its tiny seeds skitter across the gleaming stainless steel. Sunlight streams through the open kitchen windows. Bare feet on the cool linoleum floor, I’m singing along to an indie band called Pomplamoose — a mashup of pop songs from different decades, mixed together in a way that feels somehow fresh and familiar all at once.

Nostalgia on top of nostalgia.

I place half the yellow pepper, waxy side up, on the wooden chopping board and begin to slice. The blade goes through with a satisfying crunch. I stack the ribbons neatly: bright yellow beside the orange of carrot and the red of halved cherry tomatoes. A rainbow of warm tones. I pop a ribbon of yellow into my mouth and bite down — cold, juicy, and sweet — then tilt the board over the salad bowl and use my knife to gently scrape them in, the bright colours tumbling into a bed of greens.

It’s one of the first truly warm days of spring. Carl and I have just come back from the Sunday market in town, paper bags bursting with fresh produce.

As I start peeling an apple, I’m thinking of my mother. I can still hear her calling out from the kitchen of my childhood home “I’m peeling an apple for the salad!” and here we come, my brother, Ryan and I, running down the narrow passage in our socked little feet, tipping the oversized chairs, dragging them up to the kitchen counter, climbing up and propping our little elbows on the table, expectant. Ryan is six years old, full of tales about the classroom hamster. I am older by five years, a gap-toothed eleven.

Our mother has peeled the apple carefully, in one unbroken wavy spiral. She lifts it like a prize, then divides it between two small plates — just fleshy apple skins, but she is sliding them across the counter toward us like two tiny Michelin-star dishes. We linger long after, negotiating for salad scraps — a corner of carrot, a bit of cheese. It was the variety, the novelty, that we relished with a kind of pure joy.

I smile at the memory, wishing that my family was here in New Zealand and not halfway across the world. I get a third of the way through the apple peel spiral before it breaks. Mom still holds the record.

Before putting the salad into the fridge to cool, I build a forkful with a bit of everything — a cube of cucumber, a slice of avocado, a crumble of feta, a sliver of walnut perched on top. It towers precariously — brightness, crunch, and sweetness in one perfect bite.

I hear Carl approaching the kitchen. “I hope you’re leaving some for me,” he teases. I smile, caught — mouth full and trying not to laugh. I slide the carton of cherry tomatoes toward him, an offering. He takes one, tosses it into the air, catching it easily and pops it into his mouth.

Most nights, I leave my imagination at the kitchen door and just get the dinner done as quickly as possible.

But there are days when I pick from the vegetables before me as if from a painter’s palette — balancing the textures, colours, and flavours. And just like that, the line between art and sustenance dissolves like watermelon on the tongue, and I am fully absorbed in the making.

There are patterns that stretch across, not just art, but all things artfully done. Whether it’s a moving piece of music, a memorable speech, or an outfit that just works, you can feel when it lands — when it hits the senses just right.

You just know.

Intuition is a strange, impulsive creature. In one hand she grips a fistful of spears, ever ready to jab when you least expect it. In the other, she holds the ropes and pulleys that wrap around your heart, a sudden little tug.

I’m reading at my usual slow pace, my brain still wrapping around the words, and already I feel her grip on my heart.

“Wait,” I whisper. “Wait until I’ve reached the end of the sentence.”

But she does not wait, and as she tightens her hold, the words on the page begin to blur, and already the ink is slipping.

“Wait,” I plead, “I don’t even understand what it means yet.
I haven’t figured out whether it’s an analogy or —”

But the words are already gone, dissolved into salt water, and my heart doesn’t care. She has caught the writer’s meaning, and left my brain gasping to catch up.

I think this is how the artist is born: you are seeking out language for what you already feel. Because it’s not enough to be moved. When every light is flashing red — you must know what it was that reached through the words, the notes, the paint strokes and took hold of you.

You begin to take apart every beautiful thing, like a graverobber studying how the tendons connect to the muscle — until you think you understand what makes one thing stir butterflies in the belly, while another, nearly identical thing, feels dull and flat and lifeless.

And little by little, what was once intuitive becomes intentional.

Over time, you gather ideas. Little tricks, rules, observations. Some fall apart on closer inspection. Many drift dangerously into superstition. But a few ideas stay with you, becoming a kind of compass that guides you across art forms, and disciplines.

My father parks outside of City Hall. The noisy rumble of the dusty red Volkswagen van settles into silence as he cuts the engine and we get out. Behind the old clock tower, Table Mountain looms — its thick cloud cover forming a blanket that spills out over the flat summit of the mountain, dissolving as it descends.

We’re early. Only a handful of people are already here. The foyer is cool and quiet, soft voices, shuffling footsteps, a muffled cough, and then a stooped man with a greying beard is tearing my ticket. We find our seats in the third row from the stage, almost in line with the centre, the seats are velvety red, worn from years of use. My feet dangle above the floor but I can see everything from here.

I look around. The walls are pale cream, edged with ornate mouldings that top each pillar and curve around every arch.

On stage, the chairs form a wide semicircle and at intervals, music stands wait with their sheet music already open. A tall man walks out from the wings and takes his place behind a great double bass. He sits, shifting his position a few times before drawing his bow across the strings. A deep, resonant groan rolls out.

Behind him, the organ rises up in a wall of tall brass and mahogany pipes.

More players arrive, chatting softly as one carries a flute, two carry violins, a French horn, a clarinet. As they settle in their places, the sound gradually builds. An oboe holds a long note, the strings begin humming in their honeyed tones, warm against the clean woodwinds trilling brightly, the horns in their muted brass and the sharp burst of trumpets.

This is my favourite sound in the world — the sound of an orchestra warming up.

The music hasn’t been pulled tight yet — so it's like listening to a vast cloud of sound that the ear can drift through, wandering towards this instrument and that as each player is turned inward, listening each to their own instrument.

A beautiful cacophony, so full of anticipation.

Just then, the conductor strides onto the stage in his coat tails. He scans the orchestra, his movements stiff and abrupt. He nods once to the group, then turns to face the audience. He says a few words that I don’t remember, and then announces that they are about to play the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth symphony.

The conductor raises his baton. It hangs in the air, a moment stretched in silence.

And then, those four notes, the echo of which I can still hear today.

Da-da-da-DUM

I was nine years old, feet dangling off a velvet seat, thinking mostly about the size of that double bass and whether the conductor was standing too close to the edge of the stage.

That’s the strange thing about memory — what slips past unnoticed at the time can return years later, pulling taut, revealing what it was connected to all along.

Now I remember that day, as if Beethoven himself were giving me a lesson in form with the orchestra as his translator.

And now I will do my best to share that lesson with you.

One — It starts with a simple idea.

You don’t need a grand idea. The best one is like a marble in your pocket or something you’d whistle while mopping the kitchen floor.

In music we call this a motif.

In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony those four opening notes, are our star ingredient. So tiny — just four notes — but so potent that we had to name them: ’Fate, knocking at the door.’

Da-da-da-DUM

The piece opens with our idea standing alone. Fate, stark and unaccompanied. It’s the silence around her that makes her powerful. Her shadow fills your doorstep.

I imagine a person approaching a lectern, stepping into the spotlight to deliver a powerful speech. They start with one short, perfect sentence — something they’ve spent time refining and rehearsing, because they know it holds the seed of everything to come. And they pause just then1.

They let it land, watching as it settles over the crowd.

It’s the same with Beethoven’s Fifth.

Two — Repetition.

Da-da-da-DUM

Our four notes are repeated for emphasis, this time a little lower and more ominous, as if Fate is saying. “I can see your car in the driveway and I know you’re actually home.”

You wouldn’t add just one cherry tomato to your salad — you want its pop of sweetness to return. And you wouldn’t want to forget that Fate was standing at your door. That’s why, in Beethoven’s Fifth, the sense that all of this unfolds from just four notes is never lost. The motif reverberates throughout the piece, never straying far. It returns. It insists. She knocks again.

There really is no escaping her.

Repetition ties a ribbon through an idea, making it stick in your mind — and stay there.

Three — Development

This is where the pattern begins to reveal itself. The wind section stirs, as if waking up, rippling upward in playful fragments, and building energy. Twisting and inverting, the music turns this way and that, chattering and questioning. Fate? Who is she? Where is she? She’s here? What could she possibly want with us?

We develop our idea. We turn it over and break it apart. We put it back together wrong on purpose, just to see what happens.

Development is a kind of interrogation. It asks: what else could this be? What happens if I stretch it, reverse it, or flip it upside down?

It’s where the original idea gets tested, pulled in directions it didn’t ask for, sometimes fighting back. Sometimes it surprises you and grows in ways that you didn’t expect.

Development takes a tiny seed and uses it to build a mighty oak, it’s branches twisting into the sky, even as every branch remembers where it began.

Four — But we also need contrast.

A speaker must outline the opposing view to let you feel the tension between opposites. Without contrast, there are no stakes — no reason to follow where his argument leads.

The cello’s voice feels even more sonorous beside the airy brightness of the woodwinds, and the woodwinds must make us imagine the bright sunshine that shone on us before Fate’s dark shadow ever darkened our doorstep, lest, we become numb to the darkness.

The brightness of lemon is set against a hint of chili, the soft bite of avocado against the warm crunch of toasted walnuts.

It’s the movement between extremes that creates energy.

On a rollercoaster, all that height — all the anticipation in the slow, click-clack to the top — only works if the drop comes right after. If you don’t place the high point next to the low, every additional inch of metal is nothing but wasted engineering.

The thrill is in the falling. Contrast is how you feel the depth of the form.

And finally — Five — the return:

The speechwriter will return to his original words, but not to the same place — he never could.

Because the first time he spoke them, those words echoed through the room without context. But if he’s done his job well, building upon his idea — turning it over, and letting it unfold — then when he speaks them again, they will land differently.

Maybe they’re the same words. Maybe a variation. But now they’re heavy with meaning.

We don’t come full circle because we return to the beginning, changed.

I think of Beethoven — the man — the way we often picture him: bushy eyebrows, furious scowl. Unruly, wild, and defiant.

He lived in a time when composers were expected to serve wealthy patrons, but Beethoven increasingly refused to be owned. He wrote for public audiences, for himself, and for the sake of the art.

He admired Napoleon, at first. When he began work on his ambitious Eroica Symphony, he titled it Bonaparte, dedicating the piece to a great man who had risen to power by merit, not by bloodline.

Then came 1804, when Napoleon dared to crown himself emperor, placing the laurel on his own head. For Beethoven, this was a betrayal. “Now he too will trample on all human rights,” he was said to have shouted.

In a fury, he marched to the title page and scratched out Bonaparte’s name so violently that he tore the manuscript, and renamed it:
Sinfonia Eroica — composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.
Not a great man, but the memory of one.

But listen to the music, and you’ll hear that for all that passion and fire, Beethoven was a master of structure, taking apart a small idea and turning it over in a hundred inventive ways.

It’s the shape that lets the wildness sing.

The shape of a spiral.

With it you can build anything: a symphony or a clay vase.

But there’s a danger, too. Push the development too far, too soon — or stretch it before it is ready, and the shape cannot hold. It collapses under it’s own weight.

Image Credit:
Edgar Degas, 1878, ‘L'Etoile’ - Musée d'Orsay

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I slam the shapeless lump of clay down with a dull thud against the wooden workbench, its surface covered in streaks of paint and sheets of old newspaper. My sleeves are pushed up, palms dark with damp clay, forearms coated with paler dried clay that cracks into fine dust on my skin.

I’ve kneaded it carefully — folding, pressing, folding again. Any air bubbles trapped in the clay could make it crack in the kiln — or worse, explode, sending shards flying. I give it one last firm slap against the tabletop just to be sure.

Dipping an edge of my sponge into a little tub of muddy water, I let it dribble over the clay to make it just a touch softer — working it’s moisture in. Too much and it would squelch into mud in my hands. Too little, and it would crumble in the shaping. There’s clay drying under my fingernails and smudges of pale dust on my school uniform.

I love this class.

It’s funny that out of all our classes, this one — where the desks are arranged in a large U-shape and idle chit-chat is allowed — ends up being the quietest. We speak gently, as if the clay holds a kind of magic that calms and grounds us, somehow. Little pockets of conversation rise now and then, but they quickly fade again, settling back into the dull thuds of clay on wooden tables, the scrape of tools, and the quiet shifting of bodies leaning into their work.

I breathe slowly, deliberately taking in the damp, earthy smell — and beneath it, the familiar, bitter tang of fired bisque that lingers in the air.

Tearing off a lump of clay, I roll it into a rough ball, pressing my thumbs into the centre to create an opening and begin shaping it into a smallish bowl shape. This is the solid base that I’ll build from.

In a plastic tub, I have an assortment of items that would look to anyone else like junk, but they are my potters tools. A muddy sponge, a few scrappy bits of plastic cut from an old margarine tub. A length of fishing wire tied at the ends with corks, a butterknife rusted along one edge, a fork with it’s prongs slightly bent out of shape.

I scratch the rim with the fork, dribble some water to prepare the surface, shape the next piece, lay it on top and blend it in. The vase begins to grow upwards, one layer at a time.

I fall into a rhythm.

We often think of creativity as something wild, like Jackson Pollock recklessly flinging paint across a canvas. But much of the time, it looks a lot like this. The comfortable absorption in a routine, an elbow on the table, the solving of one small problem and then another, pausing to make a cup of tea, before leaning forward again into the soft pull of the flow.

Creativity is not chaos. Its wildness lives inside a shape, like a flame dancing on the wick of a candle.

Without structure, wildness collapses under its own weight,

it cracks in the kiln,

it burns out.

“Too heavy in the thumbs, Tara,” Mrs Collette calls out to me.

Here’s the trouble: When I blend the outside of my clay vase, pressing in with my fingers, I have just the right touch — firm but gentle — and the structure rises, straight and tall. But when I reach in to smooth the inner join with my thumbs, I press too hard. The walls push outward, just slightly. But with each layer, the shape flares a little more.

I’m participating in a slow-motion tug-of-war. I’m trying to make a vase — but it insists on becoming a fruit bowl.

“I’m not very good at this,” I groan.
The same thing happened on my last two projects. This time, I started with a narrower base, but that has only made it worse.

Mrs. Collette’s short hair has a hint of fiery red, her wide face creased with a weathered smile. Her glasses perch too far down her sharp nose, the bridge smudged with faint clay fingerprints. Her love for this craft extends far beyond the walls of this classroom.

“Don’t be frustrated”, she says warmly — “It comes with time.”

With skilled hands, she picks up my fishing wire and shows me how to cut a small V-shape into the side of the vase, removing the excess. Then, gently, she presses the freshly cut sides back together — returning my vase to the shape I’d intended.

“There,” she says “Now blend that in. That’s a trick you can use any time you get stuck,” she says, smiling. “But you’ll have the knack of it in no time.”

And somehow, the way she says it makes me believe her.

Image Credit:
Paul Cézanne - circa 1896 - Nature morte aux pommes

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I was standing in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in the spring of 2010. The painting was somehow both bigger and smaller than I’d imagined, because in my mind, it wasn’t a painting at all.

It was the symbol of an era1.

Every wall and pillar was hung about with heavy, gilded frames. And all around me, I could feel the invisible influence of the Medici family — tied to every painting, every sculpture. Even we tourists seemed to hang on their strings as we shuffled from masterpiece to masterpiece in those high-ceilinged rooms, bathed in a soft light that could hold time suspended.

Low murmurs of reverence mingled with the echoing of footsteps, and then at once, all sound vanished as I stood face to face with Venus herself, taking in the delicate paint strokes, the details on Hora’s dress, the blossoms caught on the wind. And I felt a strange pull, then — a tugging at my thoughts, calling me away. I couldn't help it — I was looking at Venus, thinking, "Where is the Primavera?" I have always thought of these two paintings as sisters, and now that I was looking at the one, I could feel the invisible tug of the other.

I turned.

My mother was smiling her faraway smile, impossible to know what she was thinking. She was draped in tags and lanyards — we all were — to identify which tour group we had come with.

My little brother, Dylan, only nine, was indiscriminately scanning the whole room at once, wide-eyed, and overwhelmed by all the gold, the marble, and all the haloed saints.

And then I saw it — partially obscured by a row of tourists, across the room: It was Botticelli’s Primavera. She was here, too — of course she would be — in the same room, the two paintings holding a conversation across centuries.

I feel that if you look at the Birth of Venus out of context, you might miss Botticelli’s trick. It’s like seeing a painting of the moon by day. I have long thought that you need to first set your eye on the dark canopy of the orange grove in Primavera, where the figures are lit as if by an inner light, impervious to the shadows around them. Impenetrable.

Only then, when you look at Venus again, you see the radiance.

She glows.

In Botticelli’s hands, the boundary between myth and religion blurs: He was weaving the Virgin Mary into his idea of Venus, floating toward us like a blessing, with sea-spray tousling her golden hair.

We’ve stepped out into the courtyard now, eyes adjusting to the mid-afternoon light.

I press forward, following a floating head of cropped dark hair beneath a wide-brimmed hat as it bobs and weaves through the cobblestone streets of Florence. Our tour guide. She fields questions with the practiced ease of someone who has answered them a thousand times before. Her smile is quick, her gestures animated. Her enthusiasm is all for the crowd, not for the wonders themselves.

Earlier that day, I remember standing in the grassy Field of Miracles, in Pisa; looking up at the Leaning Tower. The clouds had been rolling overhead, thick and heavy with the threat of rain, painting an impossible marbled sky of crisp white, deep blue and dark grey.

I had been under a different kind of spell that morning. Instead of soaking in the details of the tower in front of me — with its intricate repeating lacework; the pillars catching the shifting light and shadows pooling in the arches — I was angling my camera this way and that, absorbed in the search for the ‘perfect angle’. I was trying to capture that other leaning tower — the one that I had seen in other people’s holiday photos. I thought I had almost captured it.

But as we climbed back onto the bus that would take us from Pisa to Florence, I realised my mistake as a flush of regret rose up in me — and a pang of shame. I had spent a year saving for this trip on my tiny salary, relishing every peanut butter toast dinner, savouring the thought of the 10 days that I would spend in Europe. And here I was, seeing it through the lens of my camera, letting it slip by.

I reached my seat and sat down heavily, berating myself.

Dylan climbed into the seat beside me. With all the cool composure of a nine year old, he scanned the other passengers boarding the bus, adjusted the straps of his camera, and switched it back on to check the battery level. I wondered what he would remember of this trip. When he’s older will he say “Oh, yes, I’ve seen the statue of David in Florence, The Sistine Chapel, The Sagrada Familia in Spain. I saw these things when I was young, and besides, I can look them up on the internet, can’t I?”

Or perhaps, when he is older, he will look at every photograph with a sense of half-recognition, asking “have I seen you once before, in real life?” Maybe he’ll look closely, hoping to catch a memory, searching old monuments like the faces of old friends.

Instead I worry — he’s missing out on the longing. For me, it is the longing that was beautiful — poring over artworks in black and white on cheap printer paper, relishing even a glimpse of color. Even those, ghostly images projected onto the whiteboard of a classroom. I learned to stretch the colors out in my imagination; to make them last.

I look at him, my eyes forming the question.

He turns to me, then, and says: “Oh my gosh, can you imagine if the leaning tower fell over right now, just as our bus was leaving?” And we both laugh.

In Florence, September’s sun is gentle with only a thin scattering of clouds. The breeze carries snatches of French, German, and Cantonese. There are bursts of camera flashes as we approach a particularly pretty spot. To my right, a woman gathers her family for a photograph, the river Arno as their backdrop. Arms raised, she is orchestrating the moment and as the camera clicks, I see a wave of relief pass over her face as one more memory is safely recorded.

The crowd begins to thicken as the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore comes into view in the heart of the city. From a distance, the huge marble blocks seem mostly white, luminous in the sun, but as we draw closer, the colours begin to reveal themselves, subtle threads of green and terracotta. The mid-afternoon light slants across the facade, setting off a faint rose tint that collects in every carved detail, giving the stone a blush of Tuscan sunset. I turn, squinting, to look into the sun, but it’s still riding high in the sky. It’s a clever sleight of hand, baked into the marble by the builders.

As we step into the enormous shadow of the cathedral, the heat drops suddenly away, and the facade rises like a patchwork quilt into the sky. I make my way to the edge of the cathedral, and Brunelleschi’s immense dome soars into view, capping the cathedral and floating above the city’s red roofs — a red rose in the skyline of Florence.

I try to hold onto the magic of this moment, but the crowd presses in — tourists speaking in a dozen languages, camera flashes, smartphones and a hundred little clues that it’s 2010.

Dear Reader, we’ve reached the place, but the Florence I wanted to show you isn’t here. She has receded into the centuries between then and now.

The real city — the one where this dome rises, not from these cobbled streets, but out of the very soul of the Renaissance — has vanished beneath the press of this crowd and the noise of the present.

To find her, we have to go back 600 years.

Back to 1401.

Image Credit: ‘Birth of Venus’ by Sandro Botticelli, Florence 1486, and ‘Primavera’ (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli, Florence 1482.

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I am sitting, hunched under fluorescent lights, sketching a rough set of designs — the iterations fanning out around me in a kaleidoscope of black and white. The room is quiet except for the soft scratch of the pencil against smooth printer paper.

The world contracts to this single grid, three by three on a clean white sheet — the graphite shapes and lines swimming in my vision.

For all the expensive design software installed on the laptop, it sits abandoned at the far end of my desk. At this early stage of a design, nothing quite compares to the old ways: pencil, paper and pen — the most direct path from thought to page.

I am sketching a logomark for a boutique law firm.

When I first met Jane, for coffee, I had been imagining the kind of lawyer you’d see in a courtroom drama, all sharp edges and pinstripes. But Jane breezed into the café in a cozy sweater, immediately disarming me with her warmth and easy conversation. Over coffee we shaped the idea of her brand — one that would feel just like her: intelligent, caring, modern, grounded.

My questions are strategic, but I am listening for something else — a kind of indescribable essence that slips out from the space between her words. Once I catch it, the design will find its way.

I hope.

Now, I sit with pencil and paper. So far, none of the sketches quite match up to the image in my mind’s eye, but each attempt is bringing me a little closer.

Design is a balancing act. Too much thickness and the line looks heavy, too fine and the detail is lost. I hold a sketch out at arm’s length, squint, and lean in again.

This grid of 3 by 3 is my little world and I am the queen of micro-adjustments, searching for the moment when everything clicks into a visual logic that feels inevitable, and Jane’s essence is captured in ink.

I chase a pencil line with pen, correcting the curve of it, suddenly noticing how quiet the office is around me. I look up. It’s 6:45pm — much later than I thought. I notice then, the hunch of my back and straighten out, stretching my arms in a big arc, holding the pose in a vain attempt to undo the hours of poor posture.

It’s dark outside. Below, the streetlamps cast soft pools of amber light onto the pavement, lighting the way to my bus stop. The street shimmers with the memory of rain, streaked with red, orange and white, reflections from traffic lights and passing cars.

I pick out the sketch that feels closest to what I’m after and stack the pile. The design staring up at me is supposed to be the best one, but I screw up my nose in dissatisfaction. I take in the shape of it, committing it to memory, noting what’s working and where the problems are. “I’ll fix you tomorrow,” I tell it, silently.

Grabbing coat and handbag, I slip out of the office, pushing the sliding glass door closed with a click. I cross the empty floor, and press the button for the elevator. Waiting, I turn to take in the waterfront at night. Inside, the office glows brightly; outside, the darkness presses against the glass, the two scenes layered in reflection.

The lift dings and the doors slide open with a hush.

The bus comes to a stop on my corner and I step out into the cool night. The air is crisp and quiet, nothing but the soft crunch of my boots on the pavement as I walk the shadowy path to our house.

I slide the key into the lock, but the door moves too easily. Carl is already pulling the door open, the house is warm and bright. “Hi honey, sorry I’m late.” Carl gathers me into his arms, his hug warm, his kiss gentle, leading me into the house, where my senses are suddenly flooded with the fragrance of onions caramelizing, and the drone of the extractor fan competing with the sounds of a techno marching band which has turned the kitchen into a kind of electronic carnival.

Later, when the house is calm and quiet again, carrying a steaming mug of tea, I pad through to the study and settle at my piano. It’s a Yamaha digital stage piano.

I put the headphones on.

Spreading my hands over the cool, smooth keys, I arrange my fingers in the most random pattern I can think of — a jumble of black and white. I press down, letting the chord’s wrongness fill my ears. I play it again, louder this time, letting the chaos swarm around me like a hive of angry bees.

I will now perform my trick.

I pretend I played this chord on purpose and listen closely to each note. Each one asks a question. Some notes feel magnetically pulled to a centre of gravity — a C# that longs to become a C. Some would rather turn in ornamentation around it’s resolution before coming to rest like a dancer circling their partner. Some will hold firm, staying exactly where they are, letting the other notes settle around them and others still want to burst free, spinning up and down the keyboard creating music in their path. I give each note what it wants, I let the chaos resolve into order and I let the order ring out, loud and certain and true.

And then I sit in the resonance as it dissolves into silence, thinking about how, in art, the paths from chaos to order can be so clear. So simple.

I will it so.

When I was 15 years old, I crossed two checkboxes on a form and heard the distant sound of a door slamming shut.

The guidance counsellor was shaking her head slowly, compassion and concern mixing on her face. Mrs Johnson had called me into her office to discuss my choice of subjects for the following year, and now she was tapping a long painted fingernail against the two ink-checked boxes that she found most confounding.

“Tara, I want you to think carefully about the decision you’re making” she said, choosing her words, “You could choose between music or art and still have a pathway to university, but by choosing both, you’re shutting that door.” I looked at her blankly, her words bouncing off me, utterly meaningless.

In the clear glass of her cabinet door, overlaid on the rows of textbooks and student files, I caught my own reflection — a girl with a pale, round face and strawberry blonde hair tied with a thin hairband. Something defiant in the tilt of my chin told Mrs Johnson that she wasn’t going to change my answer.

Heading down the corridor away from her office, I tugged at the lapel of my too-large blazer in irritation, replaying a parody of the conversation in my head:

“So, Tara, would you like me to saw off your left arm or your right arm? Choose carefully now — you wouldn’t want to pick the wrong one.” Reaching my locker, I unlocked it, kicking it open with a bang, delivering the line that I could never have said in the presence of Mrs Johnson: “I’ll keep both art and music and you can keep your darned pathway to university.”

I was the culture kid at school. I took both music & art classes, and though none of the other kids would have agreed with my assessment, I felt that it gave me the ultimate superpower: I could stack my art history on top of my music history like layered transparencies – like blueprints.

It was, to me, a kind of x-ray vision.

It’s magical, the way art, music, scientific discoveries, historical events, philosophy and writings of a time all weave together, forming a rich, textured map. One era bleeds into the next, but each has a distinct atmosphere that is entirely its own — a prevailing ideology that echoes from canvas to stone to laboratory to printing press.

I once imagined that if I could just learn enough of the details, I could blink and find myself wandering the echoing galleries of the Uffizi in a 17^th Century Florence — or maybe I would eavesdrop on Degas in an 1870’s Paris, as he sketched his dizzy-spinning ballet dancers.

A distant trumpet calls — it’s muted brassy voice a question, suspended in the air for a long moment.

The pause that follows is holding its breath…

I blink.

Image Credit: ‘Seated Woman with a Parasol’ by Georges Seurat, France 1885.
Black Conté crayon on ivory laid paper. Art Institute of Chicago.

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All I wanted to do was write an essay about the impressionists. I did not ask them
to descend on me and ransack my house. “Oh?,” said my heart, “I think you did.”

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I arrive to a morning already in motion. The coworking space is a cocoon of warmth and brightness — energising against the grey drizzle outside. But I barely register any of it as I drop my handbag on the desk with a thump, lost in thought.

The office is a quiet modern space perched on the edge of the city, overlooking the wide grey-blue sweep of Wellington’s waterfront. This morning’s view is softened by a haze of droplets against the clear glass.

The days here move in an easy rhythm: low murmurs of conversation rise and dissolve into hushed stillness, muffled laughter drifting now and then from nearby offices.

I shrug off my coat and open my laptop, my mind already occupied with the three most important tasks of the day. I am turning them over, trying to decide which one needs my attention first and, caught in a moment of indecision, I find myself reaching for my phone, thumb already scrolling, defaulting to the comfort of distraction.

That’s when I see it.

It’s an essay by an artist I know — a piece written in a pleading tone:
“AI poses a very real threat to artists everywhere, threatening their work, their value, and the very meaning of art itself.”
I’ve heard this argument everywhere lately, so I am unprepared for the sudden wave of frustration that rises up in me.
“I spent years honing my craft,” it reads. “But if beautiful art can be generated with a click, then what is left for us?” I recognise the fear beneath it, and the concern is a valid one, but I feel my chest tighten with involuntary annoyance.

“This is ridiculous!” I snap. “It’s pointless raising your fist against the machine, hoping it will just go away.” My agitation feels out of place in the relaxed atmosphere.

When something unsettles me, my instinct is to fly straight into problem-solving mode – to restore order and resolve the dissonance as quickly as possible. Restless, I put down my phone and walk to the coffee machine. It hisses to life, steam feathering up in the morning air. Cradling my flat white, I make my way over to the big office windows, the waterfront stretching wide before me.

A calm wind gently smudges the shifting dimpled surface of the Pacific as small vessels mill about the bay, crossing each other in the middle distance.

Further out, an Air New Zealand plane with its distinctive black and white patterned tail is descending through the soft rain, wheels extending in its slow, deliberate approach. It hovers on the edge of arrival and then, just before touchdown, the plane slips behind the dark curve of Mount Victoria, disappearing from my view — leaving the moment unfinished, the landing happening somewhere out of sight.

I stand for a long moment, my gaze resting in the negative space.

Sometimes, the events of today carry a texture that feels strangely familiar — as if another time in history has lurched into orbit with our own, and the distance between then and now thins. The players of that time stop feeling like unknowable characters, and you begin to imagine you can feel the weight of their questions.

The Impressionists had been circling for weeks, at the edges of my mind in a wide, holding pattern, so when I reached for a story that might resolve the unease I was feeling, they came into view.

They were, after all, artists coming to blows with the technology of their day, just like us.

I began to wonder what it must have felt like to live through the disruption of the 1870s. The camera was gaining popularity, and suddenly you could recreate what the eye could see without the need for human hands. At the same time, the rigid standards of precision and order in art, which had held firm for centuries, were beginning to unravel. A group of artists in Paris were making waves, breaking with the Traditional arts. People at the time mocked them. “They have no skill,” the critics said.

For those who held firmly with the values of their day, it must have felt as if the very foundations of art were crumbling before their eyes.

But from where we stand today, the Impressionists overcame the gatekeepers of art and beauty, offering us a richer, more expansive concept of what art could be. Perhaps, when the camera freed human hands from the burden of depicting the world so accurately, artists could finally reach for new ways of seeing.

“Technology gave them their wings to fly,” I smiled hopefully, and tapping my pencil against the side of my coffee cup triumphantly, I felt like I had already solved it: I would write the essay — a neat parallel to our time, paired with an inspiring and hopeful message.

Very on brand for me.

But looking back, it reflected a kind of positivity that was only skin deep. “It’s never that simple.” Still, it would serve as my contribution on the topic and settle the uncomfortable feeling that was gnawing at the back of my mind.

The shift from Traditional to Modernist art is abrupt. You walk through a doorway from one room in an art gallery to the next — and everything changes. The Impressionist moment has always filled me with a strange sense of awe. The paintings are full of weather, as if someone opened a door and the art world wandered outside, blinking into the dappled light, the drifting clouds, and the swirling wind.

How did it feel to shatter the precision of the traditional arts; to walk away from centuries of mastery and step into a completely new era?

I thought I was only pulling on questions about art history and its resonance with our present moment. I didn’t know that the thread I was tugging on would run so deep that it would crack me open.

“Good news,” my doctor said, her voice warm and reassuring on the line. “I’ve got the results of your MRI, chest X-ray, and ultrasound — it’s all clear”

“Great,” I said, trying to sound relieved. “Nothing to worry about, then.” Except I’d had a sensation of a lump in my throat for weeks, a tight, unmoving knot at the base of my throat, as if a pebble had settled there and refused to dissolve.

And now, with this news, I was supposed to be feeling relief.

Instead, I open my laptop again and check my emails. While I had been away from my desk, my three urgent tasks had become four.

The Impressionists would have to wait.

8 Years Ago

In 2017, I left South Africa — the only home I’d ever known — and moved across the world to New Zealand with my fiancé, Carl. He had just accepted a job offer in Wellington, and within two months, we were packing up our lives and preparing to move eleven thousand kilometers away, across the Indian Ocean.

We had shipped some of our belongings to our new address, but those wouldn’t be arriving for another nine months. That meant one big suitcase and a carry-on would have to be enough for a while.

So what do you pack?

My laptop, of course, and our Egyptian cotton sheets. And what about my books? I tried to whittle down the towering collection I’d spent years building.

When that proved impossible, I picked three precious volumes I couldn’t bear to leave behind: a vegetarian cookbook, and two large history books, both by Peter Watson — ‘A History from Fire to Freud’ (That had me covered for early human history) and ‘A Terrible Beauty’, (a history of the twentieth Century).

Now, looking back, I see what I was really doing. I was trying to hold on to something solid and true in the shock of moving to a new country where everything else would feel unfamiliar. In my own way, I was trying to carry the whole human story with me — the comfort of being able to hold the whole world in my hands.

Image Credit: Wellington Harbour, 1902, by James Nairn. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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I didn’t set out to write a book. Sometimes, though, a story seizes you so completely that you are left with no choice but to figure out the craft of writing, just to get the story out.

It started with a feeling. A knot of dissonance in me that I couldn’t understand. It made me uncomfortable and not being one to sit with such an emotion for long, I reached to resolve it. An essay would do the trick, I decided. I set out to use a story from art history to offer a vision of hope for the artists of today. It was a useful story with a clear purpose. I had the bones of it all planned out.

But the story refused to stay small. Instead, it twisted itself into a gathering storm and drew me in. Like a tornado, it swept through everything I love — moments from history, pieces of art, snatches of melody, questions of philosophy and puzzles from science, it pulled from memory and myth.

I couldn’t stop myself from writing.
For eight days I wrote with a feverish urgency that I still can’t explain. I’m someone who measures my words carefully, I hold them up to the light and more often than not, I find them wanting.

But these words refused to wait, they arrived on a string of pearls, fully formed, arriving faster than I could type them. And they resisted my questions. I would have second-guessed them, but I simply didn’t have the time. It was only through the process of writing that I was able to pull myself through the mystery to find out what it was.

At first, I thought that I was writing about a revolution that happened in the past, but as I followed it, the story stretched out across the arc of time. I began to see art as a mirror, reflecting an emotional history of the world, and as I watched those reflections playing out on the canvas, I could feel the same struggle was happening not just out there, but within me. What I thought was a story about the past turned out to be about both then and now. Both out there, and within.

A memoir, I’ve learned, is much like a pointillist painting. Each story is a coloured dot on the canvas: The blues, for the vast sea of memory & emotion, green for the solid earth of logic and knowledge, and finally, red for the reckless rebellion of the creative force. Each dot on its own is incomplete — it doesn’t tell the full story. In a cluster, you see only the messy chaos of a life. But when you step back — the eye blends the colours together. And all at once, a picture clicks into place, and you say: “Oh, That’s what you were trying to tell me”

What I did not yet know was that it can be like that for the writer, too. I was standing too close to the canvas — I couldn’t see the pattern either. Only after the last piece was in place, when I took one, two, and three paces back, did I see the picture I was forming and say, “Oh, That’s what I was trying to tell myself.”

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If you’re craving a story where logic and intuition, art and science, music and philosophy collide, I invite you to join me as I publish The Art of Hitting the Wall, chapter by chapter right here on Substack. Chapter One drops on 30 May 2025.

Image Credit:
Robert Antoine Pinchon, ‘Triel sur Seine, le pont du chemin de fer,’ 1904.