Dr. Isabella Rossi is a world-renowned art historian and materials scientist, a woman who can read the history of a civilization in a single brushstroke. Her life’s obsession is the lost masterpiece of Leonardo da Vinci, “The Battle of Anghiari.” While using a revolutionary deep-radar scanner to search for the fresco behind a wall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, a catastrophic electrical fire engulfs the hall, and her life ends in the shadow of the art she so desperately sought. She awakens in the mud-and-marble vibrancy of 15th-century Florence, no longer a respected scholar, but a young, penniless apprentice named Marco in the bustling workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Here, she must navigate a world of fierce artistic rivalries and dangerous political patronage, all while working alongside a brilliant, impossibly curious, and frustratingly arrogant fellow apprentice—a young Leonardo da Vinci. Armed with a future scientist’s understanding of chemistry, optics, and human anatomy, Marco must carefully aid the nascent genius, helping him solve the very technical problems that baffled him in the original timeline. It’s a dangerous game of guiding a giant without revealing her impossible secret, a quest not just to survive, but to ensure the masterpiece that was once her obsession does not become a casualty of history a second time.
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