I had my whole speech planned, laced with references to Petrarch and Dante and even this bit about Clytemnestra from Aeschylus’s Oresteia—it would’ve been good—but . . . Margherita always makes me lose my tongue, doesn’t she? I was holding a wooden tondo in front of me. I turned it around for her to see. I’d lashed it to my horse for the ride north and carried it under my arm through the streets of Siena while I’d followed that girl with the pig, and now I was there, and it was what I had to offer. It was that old end of that wine barrel from the night we’d met at the Pantheon, the tondo her father had given me along with the commission to make his daughter immortal. For years, it had been only a ghost of a drawing, created quickly that night on the floor of the Pantheon in chalk, but after the unveiling of the Sistine, I’d spent days—maybe a week, maybe more, time blurs—locked alone in my private rooms, away from the Vatican and the ceiling and the court whispers, and I’d filled that painting out and in, adding forms and lines, curves and shapes, strokes and colors, eyes and hands. It wasn’t finished, but it was a good beginning. It was a painting of Margherita Luti as the Madonna, sitting in a little chair—a seggiola, they call it up in Tuscany—hair in a scarf, looking out at the viewer, arms wrapped around a fat, cherub-lipped Jesus, as young St. John peered over her knee. Soft colors, soft lines.

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.