Papertrail

Murchison's clothes were strewn like a papertrail from the stair well to the living room, and the man himself was naked, bent over the toilet with a bottle of mouth wash in one hand and a glass of dissolving seltzer in the other.

If a papertrail — and not even as detailed as that for the first Council of Ephesus — could be imagined surviving for Constantine (before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge or the campaign against Licinius or the Council. of Nicaea) or for Theodosius I (before his two civil wars in the West), then these moments might not seem so forcefully dominated by a single imperial personality.

Myra retrieved a number of other pieces of the papertrail and headed back to the kitchen, spreading out the torn sheets on the table.

The papertrail generated by the sequestration and dispersal of the Royal Collection in 1649, and its partial restitution, or re-sequestration, in 1660, reveals only one painting explicitly corresponding to the description of a Salvator Mundi by Leonardo: the painting disbursed to Stone in 1651 and returned by him in 1660.

A moon's light in a ship's wake might make a similar papertrail.