The light that poured through the high, ecclesiastically arched windows of Donato’s studio was not the clean brightness of day, but something more solemn, filtered as it was through veils of dust and time, as if the very sun itself had genuflected before entering. The glass, latticed in wrought iron and stained faintly amber by centuries of Roman soot, cast elongated shapes across the worn parquet floor: cruciform shadows that stretched and sighed like the ghosts of penitent saints, forever reaching and never quite absolved.

The studio was immense, its ceilings vaulted and murmurous with forgotten prayers. Once a vestry annex to a disused chapel, it had been granted to Donato by a cardinal whose gratitude had been indistinguishable from guilt. High along the back wall, a disused altar loomed, stripped of relics but still heavy with sacred implication. Upon it, Donato had arranged objects like offerings: a cracked porcelain cherub whose gaze had faded into a perpetual astonishment, a length of crimson velvet eaten by moths, a small iron reliquary sealed with wax, and, set at the center, a golden frame with no canvas, an empty halo awaiting a face that would never come.

The scent that lingered within was complex, devotional, and unrelenting. Linseed oil, ancient varnish, beeswax candles burning low in the alcoves, rosewater gone slightly sour in the Roman heat. Beneath it all lay the darker incense of abandonment: mouse-nibbled hymnals, rain-rotted wood, and the faintly metallic sting of turpentine mixing with blood where fingers had slipped against palette knives too often to count.

Donato moved like one anointed by silence. His footsteps made no sound against the stones as he passed from easel to palette, from shadow to sun, trailing the hem of his waistcoat like a monk’s cassock. He wore his habitual attire: a smoke-grey waistcoat embroidered at the collar with delicate thread-of-silver filigree, undone at the neck where his cravat lay discarded, sweat-damp and crumpled. The sleeves of his ivory shirt were rolled, baring forearms dusted with pigment like ashes rubbed into penance. One hand held a brush, the sable bristles saturated in a pale tone the color of sighs; the other clutched a wood-and-mother-of-pearl palette, scarred and lacquered with months of unmixed agony.

The canvas before him was vast, nearly man-sized, its surface yet incomplete. It bore the beginnings of a noble, a torso robed in blush silk, the suggestion of collarbones veiled by translucent linen, shoulders tilted as though they had only just turned to face him in surprise. The face, as yet, was a void. Only a faint sketch of the brow and the slope of cheekbones marked the space where they would look upon the world, and perhaps upon him.

Around the studio, other faces watched. From the gloom of the alcoves, half-finished portraits peered with mournful expression. Saints with lips bitten in silence. The entire room felt like a reliquary of interrupted intimacy, each painting an unspoken confession, each canvas a door never opened.

Donato stood before the noble-in-progress with his eyes narrowed, brass-dark and lambent beneath the flickering of the candlelight that caught in the oil-wet sheen of the painted sleeve. His gaze lingered at the curve where shoulder met neck, the place where flesh so often betrayed the presence of soul. He studied it not merely as a painter, but as a supplicant.

Outside, the Roman afternoon thickened into the blue bruise of twilight. The bells of some distant convent tolled the canonical hour of Vespers, though their chime barely reached the studio, muffled as it was by layers of stone, sorrow, and creative delirium. Donato did not pause. He worked on, even as the candles burned low, even as his brush faltered beneath the weight of its own dampness.

Eventually, Donato stepped back, his chest rising and falling with that curious tension of someone who has wept so long that even breath feels borrowed. He set the brush down atop a carved wooden table, next to a small silver crucifix.