The life of a painter can be exhausting, can’t it? You struggle—over months or maybe years—to conceive, execute, and complete a painting, and then, even if you’re lucky enough to deliver a masterpiece, it’s all for . . . what? So, you can find yourself standing—once again—in front of yet another blank wall, wondering how you’ll ever put anything of value up there, much less something that will surpass your previous effort. And it’s not as if we painters suffer from some eternal punishment handed down by an Olympian power. No. We knowingly choose this life as Sisyphus, don’t we? I watched my father pushing the same rock up the same hill over and over again, and I exclaimed, “Sì, sì, sì! That’s what I want to do, too!”

However, some artists don’t seem to struggle. The elegant design for the Tempietto church supposedly came to Bramante in a dream; Botticelli’s painting of Venus’s birth apparently arrived so fast it was as if the wind god Zephyr was blowing at the artist’s back; and all Michelangelo must do to make miracles in marble is “set the angel already living inside each stone free.” Is that what it’s like for you or are you more like me? I fumble around a dark room for months, striking at the flint of my mind until I create a spark. The first spark, no doubt, goes out. I have to make at least a hundred sparks before I catch the char cloth, and then that flame always smokes out early. It takes a half dozen or more flames— each from another hundred sparks—before I finally make a flame large enough to grow with breath and kindling. I repeat the process with that same tiresome piece of flint for every figure, face, gesture, color . . . If having to work hard at something means you’re in the wrong craft, then I must’ve been born a bricklayer.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you listen to me fumbling around in the dark for months again, finding perfect compositions for the other three walls in that room, but do me a favor and mentally revisit that bit I told you about struggling with the design for my Religion wall and understand that I went through all of that again and again for each fresco in that room—and for each and every painting for the rest of my life.

So, let’s skip forward to March, shall we? To Carnevale to be exact. I was working in my personal rooms away from the Vatican and hadn’t left my private studio for a single festivity. Not even Martedì Grasso—with Ash Wednesday and six weeks of Lent on the horizon—could tempt me away from work.

“Raphael. You have to take a break,” Margherita said, taking the chalk from my hands.