The nation is at war. The government commissions a brilliant artist to render the war's greatest battle in oil and canvas, a master painting to hang in the national gallery. But the artist has
issues. With art. With war. With truth. She sees the imperial triumph as human savagery, the victory as butchery, her role as not a government mouthpiece but as a reporter of reality. And as she commits her vision to a gigantic canvas, the political forces around her begin to consider the fact that she herself may need to be committed...to prison.
It could be the United States in the early 21st century. But it's Italy in the late 16th. Five-hundred years difference, yet the issues -- war, art, truth and the mighty weal of the government -- are not so different at all.
