Have you seen my Marriage of the Virgin? That’s all right, it’s all the way up in Città di Castello, so it’s not as if you’d run across it on a daily jaunt. But you’ve seen copies? Then you’ll know I couldn’t deny his charge. Not exactly. Both paintings—his hanging in Perugia’s cathedral—depict Mary’s marriage to Joseph, a common enough subject, but I also employed the same composition, same setting, and—yes—many of the same figures as Perugino’s earlier version, but . . . Ma per carità! Perugino’s figures are so static there’s no rhythm, and the figures in the foreground are pressed against the picture plane, and the temple in the background is so heavy it weighs down the composition, and his colors are such thin blues and pinks. What was I supposed to do, allow a painting to remain inferior when I could see, so clearly, how to improve upon it? I didn’t say any of that out loud, of course. Courtiers never speak their own minds, but only the minds of others. “Petrarch said that the way artists emulate each other is like bees extracting pollen from flowers to make honey and wax. It’s not a matter of copying. It’s a matter of taking what’s come before and making it better.”

“Better? Better?!” Perugino’s face turned the color of cherry sauce on Easter. “I feel sorry for you, Raphael. All you want is to be the greatest, but the greatest will never be a lousy copyist.” Perugino marched out of the church. The other men followed.

Tessa took my hands and muttered how sorry she was. “And for you to bring me here, to your altarpiece of Joseph taking the hand of Mary to join for eternity. It’s so romantic.”

I turned to Tessa. Her brown eyes were wide and glistening. “Che?”

She blushed. “You’re not going to make me say it, are you?”

“Say what?”

“Rafa.” She sounded stern as a nun on Holy Thursday. “You don’t have to be coy. I don’t have a father. Nor brother or uncle. No family at all. You don’t need to ask anyone else.” She tugged plaintively on my fingers. “You’re the one who brought me here.”

“I brought you here to meet my maestro. To see if he liked my painting.”

Her fingers turned cold. “But you said today would change our lives. You said we were going to create perfection. Then, you asked me to accompany you here, to San Francesco. I told you this was where I wanted to get married.”

“Married?!” I dropped her hands.

“Or engaged.”

“Tessa, whatever gave you the impression I was going to marry you?”

Pink crept up her chest. She crossed her arms and glared.