I took out another piece, pulled up my sleeves, rolled my wrist, and kept drawing. “I can’t leave until I find it.”

“You’re painting crowds of people, right? Maybe you should be around people.”

“I promised I’d be finished with Poetry by spring.”

“Promised who? His Holiness?”

“What if I don’t finish until summer? Or the end of the year? Or next year?”

“Your fingers are staining red.”

“What if I’ve used up all my flint and can’t make fire, ever again?”

“If you don’t come with me, I’ll never let you touch me again.”

“What if Michelangelo makes a flame first and burns the rest of us down?”

“Raphael. If you don’t come with me, I’ll never let you draw me. Ever again.”

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXIX

Thanks for making me come,” I said, sketching yet another woman twirling through the glittering crowd.

Margherita Luti leaned her chin on my shoulder. We were usually fearful about being seen together, but at Carnevale, such propriety was unnecessary. Tonight, anyone could be seen with anyone and forgiven come morning. She tapped my sketchbook and said, “I was hoping you would come without this, but . . .”

“Capturing the moment in the moment is such a modern idea,” I told her, sketching Lorenzo Lotto, hips leaning against a wall, one leg crossed over the other, sketchbook resting on his knee, bending over to draw. As we’d entered the villa, a greeter had presented each artist with a sketchbook and asked us to capture the night in chalk. We drew the hundreds of guests crowding into that grand banquet hall, gorging on one final night of indulgence before Lent. “We’re all capturing such different things, too. Bramante’s getting the architecture, Sodoma’s drawing the exotics”—giraffes, camels, ostriches—“and did you see the lace-maker’s daughter sketching fabrics? She’s good.”

That’s when our host, Agostino Chigi (yes, that Chigi, the wealthiest man in all of Rome with a shock of red hair and blue eyes the color of the Adriatic), clapped his hands and his servants pulled cords, bringing the walls, columns, doors, and even the ceiling of that banquet hall cascading down—to gasps from the crowd—and landing in a pile of tapestries on the floor. “Thank you, Holiness, for your kind words, but this is not my banquet hall,” called Chigi, as the servants rolled up the fake marble floors out from under our feet, exposing simple wooden planks. “These are my stables.” As grooms led horses—chestnut, cinnamon, silver—into wooden stalls, I couldn’t sketch fast enough to capture all the surprised faces. “Change perception, change the world.” Our host clapped again, and a band of musicians led us into the real banquet hall (at least we assumed it was real, although I did keep checking behind gold-framed mirrors and under multi-colored rugs).