We both sat there, silently for a while. Finally, I said, “Do you truly believe that you can—I don’t know—paint miracles?”

“That’s why they hire us, isn’t it? To deliver miracles? If artists aren’t miracle makers, what are we?”

I looked at my feet dangling over the scaffolding like a boy. “I don’t know.”

That’s when he ambled over and sat down next to me, legs also dangling over the scaffolding. He took the flask from my hand and took a drink as I continued picking paint off my nails. “At least I like that you have a bit of dirt under your nails.”

“Oh, that’s not dirt. It’s paint. I try to chip it off, but it keeps coming back. It’s annoying.”

He looked me up and down and with a wry smile responded, “Sì. It is annoying to try to get rid of something that keeps coming back.” He nudged me and said, “I know the feeling.”

Our eyes caught, and we laughed. Me and Michelangelo. Sitting there laughing.

And I felt like an annoying, tagalong little brother.

We sat there until daybreak. I told him about growing up at court and some of Jester Dominic’s bawdier jokes. He told me about growing up in the Medici palace and his troublesome younger brother who’d once burned the family house down. At one point, sometime before dusk when we were giddy with lack of sleep and too much pink wine, I probably could’ve asked him to take me up the scaffolding to see the ceiling, and he probably would’ve obliged, but he didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask.

When you tell him this, he’ll probably say that I was afraid of facing my competition, afraid that I’d see something I couldn’t beat, afraid that I’d see I wasn’t as good as him, but that wasn’t it. It was . . . I don’t know. He’ll never believe me, but . . . For that one night, I didn’t feel like taking something that Michelangelo didn’t want to give.

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLVIII

You’ll be happy with the ceiling,” I said when Felice found me in the pope’s rooms a few days later. The warning about the invading French had come too early—the army was still days, maybe even weeks away from the city—but, while many assistants, courtiers, and cardinals had come out of hiding, the pope remained in the Castel for safety.

“He’s not painting lewd gestures?” Felice called up from the floor. My men had laid the first patch of plaster for my Heliodorus fresco that morning, so I was up the scaffolding, at the top of the wall, painting the bronze arches of the Temple of Jerusalem. I was glad to have an activity on which to focus while she questioned me. It would help keep my tone even.