Since my perfect painting had failed to bend the world as I wished, I decided to follow Rome’s lead: destroy the world in hopes of achieving peace on the other side. After all, Michelangelo had spit in the face of perfection and won, so why not me? I sat down on the marble floor in the middle of my newest room in the papal apartments—each wall prepared with blank, white plaster—pulled up my sleeves, rolled my wrists, and began to draw. I started by sketching a perfect temple: perfect balance, perfect perspective, perfect columns, perfect altar. But instead of painting my new cast of characters in a perfect rhythm as I had in the library, I aimed for something different. Over the next several weeks—as papal courtiers tended to the healing pope and my assistants built new scaffolding—I made countless drawings of figures that would twist and struggle and fly across my picture. I drew the rearing horse I’d seen during the riots—muscles tensed, nostrils flared, hooves flailing—trampling over the armored thief Heliodorus. I drew priests and faithful scattering—like Romans running away from fires—and arranged them around the periphery of my design, leaving the middle space open—no, not open, but exploded. At the center of this burst, I drew an angel—muscular and handsome, cape billowing, like that cobbler who’d jumped out of that balcony and chased after that thief—arms extended, leg back, body like cannon fire blasting a hole in the center of my design. I took the energy of those riots—violent, fearful, unknowing—and injected it into my lines. And the more uncontrolled I drew my figures, the neater I kept my stacks of sketches and rows of chalk, the more times I smoothed my eyebrows and jacket, the more times I brushed off my shoulders and checked the ties of my shoes, the more times I counted wrist rolls and steps, the harder I was on my men to make everything else around us perfect, perfect, perfect. Although I once again included my own face in the painting—off to the side, just one of the servants helping to carry Pope Julius’s litter so he could be a part of the miracle—I felt like that central angel, sent to expel danger, expel violence, expel Michelangelo from the Vatican.

And near the end of that year, I started receiving signs that I was headed in the right direction with my paint and my meticulous routines—my own Christmas miracles, if you will.