Whenever I remember the struggle—the aching fear that you’re never going to finish, that you’re ruining the painting, your career, the world—I wonder why I keep doing it. How much easier it would be if I could be content in a little town with a little house, garden, wife, family. I’m jealous of men who open their shops at nine, close for noontime siesta, lock up before dark, play with their children along the Tiber. Oh, to be a planter on someone else’s farm. But me? I’m chained to my work by these golden shackles of hope—awful, wonderful, painful, tempting hope—of something big, something important, something life-changing landing in my lap, of glory and fame, of being praised, being acclaimed, being the greatest.

So, that’s why I was still there, in the Vatican, coughing and sneezing and pushing so hard that when I went to sleep at night, all I could see were lines of my painting falling in my vision like fireworks dripping down a night sky. And that’s why I continue to fight and scream and howl and cry to this very day, all to give birth to . . . what? Love? A child? A life? No.

A painting.

“He laid too large a patch of plaster. He’ll never make it in time.”

“Five soldi says he will.”

“Make it a ducat, and I’ll take that wager.”

I’d been up my scaffolding working on a single giornata on my Philosophy wall for twenty-three hours straight. (It was wet and cool that winter—not too cold to fresco, though—and the weather extended drying time. If my men laid plaster after sundown, a giornata could remain pliable until dusk the next day, giving me a few extra hours to perfect each patch.) I’d divided my painting into forty-nine giornata. Forty-nine full days of work. In those weeks leading up to Christmas, parties of cardinals, priests, wealthy Romans, and foreign pilgrims all packed into the apartments to see if I could finish each section before it hardened. With every new giornata came a new crowd, including Imperia and some of her ladies, now tending to the Vatican without fear of the papal noose. (My Margherita, however, refused to step foot inside the palace—“the dangers are still too great,” she would say and send me back alone.) With the pope off at war, those rooms were a bacchanal nearly every night.

“I wish Leonardo were here. He’d love to see his face going up in those quick flicks of that brush.” I was using Leonardo da Vinci’s face as the model for Plato, who (along with Aristotle) stood at the center of my painting of that philosophical debate unfolding on the steps of ancient Athens.

“No, Leonardo wouldn’t want Raphael to rush; he would want legions of time for each individual hair in that beard.”