I wrote a one-act play.

Synopsis: Rome, 1511. An unknown German monk named Martin Luther arrives at the workshop of the celebrated painter Raphael. The painter and the monk, both twenty-seven years old, discover an unexpected kinship—and the beginnings of an argument that will outlive them both.

Raphael believes beauty can reveal the divine; Luther fears that even the greatest works of arts may come to stand between humanity and God. Over an afternoon and the following day—as a deadline tightens, a war empties the treasury, and a cardinal counts the cost of every pigment—their argument moves from the studio to the Vatican itself, to the scaffolding beneath the unfinished School of Athens.

Set six years before Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to a church door, IN GOLD AND LAPIS LAZULI imagines a meeting that never happened, but could have, between two men whose ideas shaped Europe for years to come.

Read it here.