A pale field, washed like chapel plaster after incense has settled, holds its own weather, and in that weather a severed head—half mask, half reliquary—floats as if a saint had been converted into an instrument, while the word Ariette (petite…
Bologna received him and gave him work. In that university city, where jurists and humanists argued late into the night under painted ceilings, he devised altarpieces whose saints seemed to hover between devotion and daydream, bodies elongated like instruments, fingers…
I climbed the marble stair while a red weather gathered over my head, since Jacopo Foggini had wrapped the well in a suspended nuvola—a cloud with shadow sewn through it—and the stair rose as if the city itself breathed upward…