I turned back to my giornata. Flick, flick, flick, flick. What else could I do but paint? I felt bad—I did. How could I have guessed that the lie I told would hurt Michelangelo? I swear, I never thought I was setting that woman’s sights on him. Never. When you tell Michelangelo this, I’m sure he’ll say—in his paranoid delusions— that it was my plan all along to sabotage him, but, honestly, how could I have known—how could I have even guessed—that the rumor of a Michelangelo victory could have possibly helped me?

Chapter XLIX

Chapter XLIX

Before we can properly deal with Felice’s determination to squash the Florentines under her heel before they could squash her father under theirs, allow me to pause and address Ravenna. The French army was mounting a deadly siege of that seaside town east of Bologna. There were rumors of massacred families, beheadings, nuns raped on the altars of local churches. Yes, the battle was happening far away, up the peninsula, but it all felt like a forecast of what would soon come to Rome when the French army finally arrived on our doorstep. Rumors flew fast and free, and the atmosphere was intense and growing more fearful by the day.

“And now, a monster’s been born in Ravenna,” Sodoma exclaimed, bursting into the apartments, while I was up my scaffolding painting my Heliodorus fresco.

Lorenzo Lotto put down his mortar and pestle. “A monster?”

“A deformed child. Born of a monk and nun,” Sodoma said, panic coloring his tone.

Lotto shook his head. “Didn’t Ravenna suffer a quake of the Earth recently, too?”

“A few weeks ago,” said Guillaume.

“And what about that red-colored moon last week?”

“These are bad omens, indeed.”

“Signs that the French are fated to win.”

“Signs of the Second Coming.”

Guillaume called up, “Paint faster, mon ami, you won’t want to keep Christ waiting.”

That spring, I painted fast as able, as if—somehow—the pope was right, and I could put a powerful enough painting on that wall to summon a miracle and turn the tide of an army. His Holiness briefly came out of hiding for Easter. Bearded, angry, and consumed by rumors of the invading French, he presided over brooding services in the Sistine, where Michelangelo’s tarped ceiling spread over our heads like a blotted moon. Pope Julius preached about a great coming battle and how we would all have to march into the fire to protect our Church. Then, he went back into hiding—“I must prepare for war!”—and I went back to my paint.