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Peter and Paul, armed, airborne, visible to one man only. The legend supplied what the negotiation withheld.

In 452 Attila came over the Alps into Italy to collect what he considered owed. Aquileia, one of the great cities of the peninsula, was erased so completely that a historian visiting generations later reported scarcely a trace; its refugees waded out to the sandbars of the lagoon, where their descendants would build Venice. Milan and Pavia opened their gates and were emptied anyway. The general Aetius, who had fought Attila to a standstill in Gaul the year before with Visigothic help, had no such allies in Italy and no army that could offer battle. The road to Rome lay open in the summer heat. What rode up that road was a committee. Pope Leo and two senior senators met Attila near the Mincio river in the flat country south of Lake Garda, and nobody wrote down what was said. What is certain is the result: Attila, undefeated, turned his army around and went back over the mountains. The prosaic explanations have never been in short supply, and most of them are probably true at once: plague was moving through his horsemen, famine had left Italy nothing to forage, troops from the eastern empire were raiding his undefended homelands on the Danube, and his own advisers reminded him that Alaric had died within weeks of taking Rome. The legend chose a better picture: the apostles Peter and Paul in the air above the old man, swords drawn, visible to Attila alone. He died the next year anyway, in bed on the night of his latest wedding, drowned in his own nosebleed, and within two years his sons had split the empire and lost it at the river Nedao; the Huns dissolved back into the peoples they had driven before them. Leo's church kept the story of the Mincio, and the story kept Leo: of the scores of popes since, he is one of the few called the Great. Raphael was handed the subject for the papal apartments in 1514 and designed it; the brushwork is mostly his workshop's. The fresco moves the meeting from Lombardy to the gates of Rome, aqueduct and Colosseum on the horizon, since the wall's argument concerns the city, and it gives Leo the face of Leo X, the Medici pope paying for the room, who also appears beside himself as a cardinal, the cartoon having been drawn before his election. The apostles overhead carry the swords the pope does not. Attila's horse shies; Leo's stands still. That is the entire argument of the wall, delivered in horseflesh.