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In September 1987, Ben Long got his first look at the altar wall of St. Peter's Catholic Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over 30 feet high at its peak, encompassing 1,540 square feet, it was the size of a small house. Long's job was to cover it with a fresco painting. The project consumed the next two years of his life. Long and the priest at St. Peter's, Father John Haughey, sometimes disagreed bitterly over the content of the fresco, recalling the battle of wills between the more famous prototypes, Michelangelo and Pope Julius II. This is the story of the St. Peter's fresco from its birth, when the struggling church was given a second life, to its aftermath, when Long received a commission for a major fresco in the Bank of America building in Charlotte. But mostly, it tells of Ben Long, a talented, complex man who learned his craft from teachers as different as his evangelist grandfather and an Italian master, in places as diverse as Vietnam and Florence-a man bucking the tide of contemporary art in his effort to create something of lasting beauty.