My talk with Felice set me back on my trail. Now wasn’t the time to give up; it was time to fight. So, I stayed up all night drawing a new image with red chalk on a large piece of paper. At dawn, I took out a ladder, leaned it against my Philosophy wall, and climbed up. To the left of center—in the open space that gave my fresco its balance and stability—I pressed my drawing facedown against the wall and smoothed it flat. Then, I peeled it away, leaving a ghosted imprint of that chalk drawing: a solitary figure sitting on the steps of Athens. Then, I took out a chisel and hammer, pulled up both sleeves, rolled both wrists— uno, due, tre, quattro—put the blade against that blank spot on the stairs, and—

Crack!

I drove that chisel into my perfect painting.

I pulled back and cracked again.

I heard footsteps coming but kept hammering.

“Mio Dio,” Bramante cried from the doorway. “What are you doing? It was perfect.”

I cracked into that fresco once again, and a chunk of plaster fell off and hit the floor. “Apparently, that was the problem.”

I finished that new figure in a single day. He sits on the steps of Athens, hunched over his paper, right in the middle of everything, and yet, he’s solitary, uninvolved in collaboration like the rest of us (certainly unlike my own portrait, one in a crowd of many, pushed off to the side). He’s Heraclitus—sì certo—the ancient weeping philosopher, the eternal pessimist, grumbling about how nothing is constant except change. But you know who he truly is, don’t you? It’s not as if I tried to disguise his features: scruffy head, flared nose, brooding glower, wearing that familiar faded tunic and those heavy work boots. I’d even painted him in his own style: sculptural, heavy, epic, however you want to describe it. No one could mistake him as anyone other than Michelangelo.

Cardinals and courtiers filed through to look at that new figure. They murmured that the addition was so seamless that it seemed he’d always been there. They said that my new figure was as realistic, weighty, and sculptural as any figure on Michelangelo’s ceiling. Maybe better. Even the pope—despite a nagging cough that had started after the Sistine unveiling and worsened with every hour—hobbled through and smacked his lips happily. Rumors of my newest achievement spread fast and thick through the halls of the Vatican.