Wiping her hands on her skirts, she came forward and took that tondo from me. Her lips parted. “Is this how you see me?”

I shook my head. “It’s how you are.”

My Madonna della Seggiola tondo in hand, she leaned her hip against the floury edge of the counter and gazed into her own painted features.

Forget Dante. Forget Petrarch. Forget Aeschylus. Forget anyone else. “There’s something I must tell you.” My mother always told me that when you present yourself to a lady, you must present yourself as you are, honestly and fully. If she accepts you, good. If not, bow and take your leave. “When we met,” I said, “I had the honor of presenting myself as a painter from the Vatican, but I must regretfully inform you that the title is no longer mine—or if it is for the moment, it soon will not be. I don’t have a shop. I don’t have a patron. I have no position on which to stand. I’ll never achieve my destiny of being the greatest painter—not in history, not of this time, not on this peninsula, not even inside the last building in which I worked. If you accept me, you doom yourself to be the wife of a painter of portraits and devotionals, nothing more, selling my wares to any man willing to part with a soldo or two. What I can vow is that I will spend the rest of my days trying to keep my promise to your father to fulfill your destiny. Without the power of the Vatican behind me, I don’t know whether I can make you immortal, but I promise to never stop trying. I’ll paint you and paint you and paint you on every panel and altarpiece, on every bread box and wine barrel I find.” I dropped to one knee. “I present myself to you, Margherita Luti, as a humble beggar of your hand.”

She looked up from the tondo as if in a daze. “What about Rome?”

“I’ve given that up, as I should’ve long ago. You were right. That city destroys everything good. I don’t want what it has to offer. I don’t want anything but you.”

“But you can’t leave Rome.”

“I was wrong, ’Gita, you were right, I want to stay here, in Siena, with you.”

She shook her head. “I was the one who was wrong. I only said that when I thought you were just some painter.”

“I am just some painter.”

“That was before I saw this.” She held up the tondo. “Is this the kind of thing you put up on the walls of the Vatican?”

“Yes. No.” I was beginning to feel foolish, still down on one knee. “Different.”

“Are your paintings in the Vatican as good as this?”

I heard my mother’s voice: be honest. “Better.”

“Then, we have to go back.” She grabbed my traveling bag off my shoulder and started shoving in knives, recipes, a few fresh rolls . . .