His Holiness was fixated on the preponderance of gold leaf. If he said, “Smell all that fish glue? If only every room could smell so rich,” one time that day, he said it a hundred. That gave me the perspective that the once-poor-fisher-boy-from-Savona-turned-pope prized wealth above all else. Felice never once looked at the painting but kept her eyes on her father—all she cared about was him. The same held true for Cardinal Alidosi. Bramante is an egotist who commented only on his own portrait in the lower left-hand corner (“I’m not that bald, am I?”

“What book am I holding?”

“The purple drapery I usually wear is a tone darker than that.”). Sodoma, Lorenzo Lotto, and Guillaume wanted to ensure that they got credit for their involvement, so they kept congratulating one another. (“That green you made, Lotto, is heavenly.”

“The final touches of the gold leaf, Guillaume, are flawless.”

“The plaster you mixed, Sodoma, is smooth as a fine polish on a Michelangelo marble.”) Cardinal Riario kept pointing out that I was a stronger painter than Michelangelo, while Cardinal de’ Medici pointed out the opposite (they both had their own perspectives on which side should win). And when Michelangelo and the pope fought about whether to use gold leaf on the Sistine ceiling—the pope insisted that he must, Michelangelo cried that the Old Testament figures and prophets were poor, so gold leaf would be inappropriate—I saw that the Florentine sculptor screamed not because he was angry, but because he was trying to brush over his hurt.

I also stepped outside of myself and got some perspective on me. When I told the crowd that I hoped my painting would “bend the world away from the earthly realm of violence, anger, and war and toward the heavenly ideal of harmony, love, and peace,” I saw the man my mother had always wanted me to be, and I was proud.

Once perfect perspective is achieved in a painting, and you lock it in by setting a specific vanishing point and drawing in your mathematically calculated lines, it doesn’t change, does it? No. It’s the foundation upon which you build your entire picture.

Too bad that perfect perspective on life never lasts.

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXVIII

March 1510