Dr. Isabella Rossi’s world ended in a swirl of priceless, ancient dust and the acrid smell of burning electronics. Her final moments were a study in tragic irony. She was in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Florence, the culmination of a life’s work, her deep-radar scanner humming as it probed the wall where Giorgio Vasari had, she prayed, hidden Leonardo da Vinci’s lost masterpiece, “The Battle of Anghiari.” She had seen a flicker on the screen, a ghost of a different chemical composition beneath the plaster, a shadow that could only be Leonardo’s experimental pigments. A surge of triumphant adrenaline had coursed through her, and then a surge of a different kind—a faulty generator, a shower of sparks, and the priceless, tinder-dry tapestries on the wall had erupted in a sheet of flame. Her last sight was the beautiful, serene face of a Vasari fresco, melting and blackening in the impossible heat. She had died reaching for Leonardo.
She awoke with a gasp, not to the sterile beeping of a burn unit, but to the cold, hard shock of a stone floor against her cheek. The air smelled not of smoke, but of linseed oil, damp clay, and the sharp tang of turpentine. A cacophony of sounds assaulted her ears: the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a chisel on marble, the boisterous singing of apprentices, the melodic cadence of a beautiful, archaic Italian. She was in a vast, high-ceilinged room, shafts of buttery afternoon light illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. The space was a chaotic temple of creation, filled with half-finished sculptures, canvases on easels, and tables littered with brushes, pigments, and anatomical sketches.
Panic, raw and primal, clawed at her throat. She looked at her hands. They were not the hands of a 45-year-old scholar, softened by a life of keyboards and research. They were the hands of a boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, thin and wiry, covered in clay dust and a dozen small nicks and cuts. She scrambled to a polished bronze plaque on the wall, and the face that stared back was that of a stranger: a pale, dark-haired youth with large, haunted eyes—eyes that were currently wide with her own terror.
The memories came then, a deluge of a life she had never lived. Marco. Her name was Marco. An orphan from a village in Tuscany, sent to Florence with a letter from his parish priest to be an apprentice in the most famous workshop in the city: the studio of the great Andrea del Verrocchio. The memories were of hunger, loneliness, and a deep, abiding awe for the art being created around him. He was a garzone, the lowest of the low, tasked with grinding pigments, sweeping floors, and sleeping on a straw pallet in the corner.
Isabella—Marco—leaned against the wall, his/her mind reeling. She was in Florence. But not the Florence of tourists and museums. This was the Florence of the Medici, of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The year, according to Marco’s scant knowledge, was somewhere in the late 1470s. She, the 21st-century’s foremost expert on Renaissance art chemistry, was now living in it.
“Marco! Stop gaping like a landed fish and make yourself useful!” a voice boomed. A stout, bearded man, Verrocchio himself, gestured impatiently toward a large sack of lapis lazuli. “The blue for the Master’s ‘Baptism’ will not grind itself!”
Numbly, she obeyed. Her new body knew the motions. She began the laborious process of pounding the precious stone and then grinding it with a muller, a task that took days of back-breaking effort to produce a small amount of brilliant ultramarine pigment. As she worked, she observed, her historian’s mind frantically cataloging everything. She was in the very crucible of the Renaissance. That sculpture in the corner was Verrocchio’s David. The young man meticulously adding gold leaf to a panel was Botticelli. The quiet, intense one sketching in the corner was Perugino. These were the gods of her pantheon, and they were now her loud, demanding, and occasionally flatulent colleagues.
But it was another apprentice who drew her attention. He was a few years older than her new body, handsome in an unconventional way, with long, flowing hair and eyes that seemed to see the world with a terrifying, dissecting clarity. He wasn’t working on his assigned task. Instead, he was staring intently at the way the light fell on a crumpled piece of cloth, his charcoal flying across a piece of parchment, capturing not just the shape, but the very physics of the folds and shadows. He worked with a fierce, joyful concentration that set him apart from everyone else.
“Pay no mind to Leonardo,” another apprentice whispered to Marco, noticing his stare. “He is Verrocchio’s favorite, but his head is full of birds and water screws. He spent all morning trying to design a machine to fly.”
Isabella’s breath caught in her throat. Leonardo. That Leonardo. He was here. Not a legend, not a myth, not a self-portrait in a museum, but a living, breathing, impossibly arrogant young man who was about to turn the world on its axis. He looked up, his gaze meeting hers. His eyes weren’t just looking at her; they were analyzing her, taking in the slump of her shoulders, the way she held the muller, the rhythm of her grinding. A faint, curious smile touched his lips, as if he had just found a new, interesting puzzle.
In that moment, Isabella understood. She had been thrown into the past, into the very heart of the world she had dedicated her life to studying. She was a ghost in the machine of history, a nobody. But she possessed a secret that could change everything. She knew the chemistry, the anatomy, the engineering that this brilliant, frustrating young man beside her would spend his entire life struggling to discover. Her death had been an ending. This, she realized with a terrifying jolt of purpose, was a beginning.
