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Peter and Paul come in over the meeting with their swords out. Only one man in the picture can see them. The legend filled in what the talks left unsaid.

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 found almost nothing left of it. 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 plainer 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. 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. 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 designed the wall for the papal apartments and painted it across 1513 and 1514, with much of the brushwork his shop'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. 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.