I was glad it was too dark for him to see me flush. “He’s a good man.”

“Who did you apprentice under?”

“Perugino.”

“Oh.” He sounded relieved. “Are you close?”

“He hates me.”

“I didn’t think anyone hated you.”

“He calls me a thief.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” I stammered. “Perugino’s figures are so static. He has no rhythm, no ease, no grace, and all of his colors are thin. If I’d copied him directly, he would’ve loved me. He only accuses me of being a thief because I improved upon his work, but what was I supposed to do? Paint poorly so as not to offend him?”

And that’s the first time that I ever heard Michelangelo laugh, a snort that grew into a chuckle that kept rolling and rolling, like a staccato under his words as he spoke. “I felt the same way about my teacher. Ghirlandaio was so quattrocento.” He kept laughing until I started laughing, too, and then he stopped, took a drink, and said—with an incongruously merry lilt still hanging in his tone—“To lose everyone so young . . .” He rolled the flask back to me. “You must’ve been born under one unlucky star.”

“Actually, I was born on Good Friday, and if you believe my mother, it was the clearest spring night in memory, and at the moment I was brought into this world, a choir of boys stood outside our window and serenaded us with Easter songs.” I found another chip of paint under my fingernail and began picking at it. “Too many people credit Perugino with my earliest training, but I didn’t join his workshop until I was eleven. Eleven! Do people think I didn’t pick up a brush until I was eleven? I understand why people want to give him credit, though; it makes for a good story. He was down here in Rome, painting frescoes for a pope, while my father was only some court painter up in a hill town. And while students all over the peninsula still copy Perugino, the only student who ever copied my father was me, but I did copy him, every day, since before I can remember, so to crown Perugino as giving me the gift of paint . . . that’s . . . that’s . . .” I pressed hard, but the paint wouldn’t come free. “My father was a painter. Why shouldn’t he raise a painter?”

“You had a painter for a father? I take it back; you were born under a lucky star. My father wanted me to take a government position.”

“He didn’t want you to carve marble?”

“Beat me for it.” He dropped his voice low and gruff and growled, “‘Michel, you’ll ruin the family name by being a craftsman.’”

“So, was it your mother who encouraged you to sculpt?”

“She died when I was six.”