Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock

connected the two knights on horses by a lance. The butt of the lance is precisely positioned close to the horse’s head on the left, and it reaches as far as, and beyond, the other knight.”
    “It was a near miss, Father, wasn’t it? He’s lucky he isn’t impaled, and look at the barb on the end of that lance.”
    “Never mind the story. So . . . You’re looking at the right side of the canvas at the knight who has had a near miss . . . Where do you look next?”
    Paolo understands her hesitation; it’s less clear in the drawing than in the painting. “Trust yourself, Antonia.”
    “I’m looking away from the battle, at the hills higher on the canvas. There are foot soldiers in the fields. They’re tiny. One is running with two spears, another has a crossbow over his shoulder, and another soldier is loading an arrow into his crossbow. Is that right? Am I looking at the right things?”
    “Just carry on. Where do you look next?”
    “That’s easy. The fields stretch from the top right of the drawing to halfway across the picture. There!” she says, pointing. “I see the big, swirling flags of the Florentine army, and there are many, many lances pointing skyward. They’re held by all the knights behind the leader of their army—”
    “Yes, behind the man with the big hat on the rearing horse. Exactly. So, remember this, Antonia. You started by looking at the man with the big hat on the rearing horse, and your gaze has moved in a circle around the picture, back to where you started.”
    “Oh.”
    “What’s the matter, Antonia? You sound disappointed.”
    “I think I am. It’s such an exciting picture, with the Florentine army charging into the enemy. But you’re telling me that there’s another story, I think. The story of how the drawing is made.”
    “Not how it is made, but how it is composed.”
    “So you thought carefully about how to . . . compose the painting before you . . .”
    “Of course. Do you think that an artist imagines the final painting in an instant? That the painting composes itself through a moment’s inspiration? The artist must have a strategy every bit as cunning as that of the commander of a great army. Like Niccolò da Tolentino, here, in this painting. Remember that!”
    She looks back to the drawing. “You’re right, Father. You guided my eyes. I had no idea you could do that.”
    “And the lesson is not over yet, because there’s something else that connects all these points on the drawing—the rearing horses, the lance between them, the soldiers on the distant hills, the swirling flags and the lances pointing skyward . . . In the painting, I applied the same colour to all these elements. They’re all white, or close to white. There’s a yellow cast to the white.”
    She stares. She lifts her outspread hands to her cheeks. “Father, that is so clever. And it would be so plain to see if I were standing in front of the painting . . . But did the soldiers really wear yellow-white hose?”
    He laughs with a slow shuddering in his chest, which prompts a coughing fit. Antonia pours ale from the pewter jug on his table.
    He repeats her words, “‘Did the soldiers really wear yellow-white hose?’” He laughs again. “It’s a fiction, Antonia. I can make the soldiers wear any colour that suits my strategy. And now, you can perhaps understand that my greatly esteemed, but guileless, patron is entirely under my control when I present my finished work. He sees what I want him to see, as surely as if I’d set off firecrackers across the painting. So, what do you say to that, Antonia?”
    She hesitates. “But why do you want to be in control?”
    He seems stumped. He looks up for several moments. “I’ll answer your question with another question. What’s the point of making a large painting if people only look at one small part of the composition? They won’t feel excited, and they won’t read the whole story.”
    “Did Lionardo Bartolini like the