“The pigment is friable here,” she said, pointing to the fresco’s edge. “Saint Sebastian’s robe. If you touch it, even with a dry finger, you’ll lift the azurite. It’s been dying for seven hundred years. Let it die in peace.”
The old man’s fingers hovered a millimeter above the crumbling fresco. attingo
“Yes.”
“When I was twenty-two,” he said, “my teacher — old Cesare — took me to a chapel in Bologna. A Madonna by a painter no one remembers. Cesare said: ‘Matteo, touch her cheek. Gently. Just once. Because one day you will forget what it feels like to believe that something this beautiful was made by hands like yours.’ ” “The pigment is friable here,” she said, pointing