Faldoni, parts 2504 - 2507

 2504. Soon the back wall of Faldoni’s cell started to fill up with painted heads. Each evening before he went to bed, he would plaster a section of his wall and paint a new head. After many days the back wall began to have the appearance of a crazy quilt, each patch of plaster having one painted head. The rectangles were all different sizes but the largest were about 8 by 10, and the smallest were only a few inches.

 2505. I hope you don’t imagine that Faldoni enters his cell in the evening and reaches to the right along the wall and switches on the lights in his room. That would not be possible for many hundreds of years to come. When he began his face painting project it was the dead of winter, and even the walk home to his convent from the church would have been in pitch blackness if not for a torch he was able to borrow.

 2506. Once in his cell he did what countless other artists did for thousands of years, he put on a hat surrounded along its brim with candles, and by their flickering light he worked away at his task.

2507. All major projects of art in that period had a budget which included ample funds for the purchase of the indispensable number of candles to complete the project, especially if time constraints required that work be done late into the evening.