The camera is standing in shade, in a narrow lane in Vienna’s first district, looking east at a square full of flat grey daylight. Everything close to the lens is dark. Everything at the end of the lane is bright. That gap is the whole picture. The left wall of the frame is a run of ochre plaster, five storeys of it, cut off by the top edge. The windows are tall and narrow with heavy sills and small carved brackets under them, and the glass on the upper floors is doing most of the work in that part of the picture: it is throwing back a mirrored, slightly warped copy of the building on the other side of the lane, so the left third of the image is a facade and a reflection of a facade at the same time.

A photograph taken in passing at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Three Flemish paintings on a gray wall: a wide peasant feast crowded with figures at the top, a dark hanging-carcass still life on the lower left, a market scene with a poultry seller on the lower right. One of them — the market scene — is confirmed Pieter Aertsen from the wall label. The others are probably from the same orbit: Aertsen, or Beuckelaer his nephew, or one of the other Antwerp painters working in the same genre tradition in the mid-sixteenth century.

Some cities look still from a distance, as if time itself slows around their rooftops. Vienna is one of those places. Stand before Stephansdom — its towers sharp against the sky, its stones patterned like woven shadow — and it feels less like architecture and more like memory made solid. The cathedral doesn’t just belong to Vienna; it watches over it. And once, long before cafés and waltzes and imperial ceremony became part of its rhythm, those stones stood witness to a day when the city came terrifyingly close to disappearing.