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"Snow," he answered without hesitation. "A lot of snow—and snow melts into water."
"Wait." Da Vinci straightened up, looking at her with a slightly stunned expression. "Snow comes from the sky."
"Yes, so..."
"It’s impossible that there’s a god…" He shook his head, rejecting the absurd thought in his mind, and stressed, "Then there must be something else."
Hedy couldn’t help but laugh softly at his reaction.
For modern people, common knowledge that we take for granted might take several hundred years to be concluded in this period.
The information gap between different times and spaces is truly vast.
"Leonardo, think about it again. When you pour a bucket of water on the ground in summer, where does it go?"
"To the sky," he answered instinctively. "That’s evaporation."
"So—" Da Vinci suddenly gasped, as if he had glimpsed the truth. "You mean, all the water evaporates up to the sky, turns into clouds, and then becomes snow or rain?"
"Mm-hmm?"
"Wow! It’s like that!" He showed an expression of realization, grabbing a notebook and hurriedly beginning to write and draw, muttering to himself.
So many questions had been forced into mythological explanations, but the truth was clearly different.
The Church claimed that God created everything, and men had Adam's apple because they choked on the forbidden fruit.
But when he dissected, there was no fruit pit, no such forbidden fruit.
The whole world had been shrouded in a vague veil of God’s existence—not God, really, but the existence of the Church, which cast countless things into infinite mystery.
But as long as he could glimpse even a little of it, or understand just a tiny bit, it gave him a strange sense of relief.
In the eyes of most, not believing in God was a sin, one worthy of execution by fire.
But the closer he got to the truth, the more he believed in himself.
I am not guilty.
I will not be watched or punished by the divine.
I am free.
In the following days, Hedy busied herself with her new workshop, while Lorenzo traveled to other city-states for various meetings and negotiations. The Doge’s Palace, in contrast, was quiet.
Several of the children were sent to the Church, actively learning sacred subjects. The women of the household kept to themselves, with servants occasionally changing the scent salts for them.
In this quiet interval, Botticelli’s new oil painting was finally completed and proudly hung in the most prominent spot of the hall.
The entire Doge’s Palace gleamed with gold and splendor, so radiant it seemed like the resting place of the Sun God.
If you walked in, you might even think it was heaven itself.
The dome above the corridor resembled a clear sky, where angels and gods appeared above the clouds. Luxurious Roman-style bas-reliefs were coated with gold paint, which made them glow even in the night thanks to the undying light of the lamps.
The council hall displayed several sculptures in various poses, with paintings from numerous masters arranged in a well-ordered manner, seamlessly integrating with the gold-trimmed family crests. Wet frescoes and woodblock prints blended effortlessly into the golden decorations.
The entire ceiling was designed in a checkerboard-like pattern, adorned with hundreds of pre-painted wooden panels with egg tempera paintings.
