Kneeling before Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, I took out a piece of chalk, pulled up my sleeves, rolled my wrist, and began drawing Michelangelo’s figures from memory, but as the last of the day’s light started to fade, I got up. There was one other thing inside that church I wanted to see: Domenico Ghirlandaio’s frescoes—scenes from the lives of John the Baptist and Mary—in the main chapel. I’d copied those frescoes several times since arriving in Florence, but this time, I was looking for something I’d never thought to find before. The Massacre of the Innocents panel looked promising— it was a dramatic scene with twisting, lurching figures. Was that the part painted by Ghirlandaio’s most famous apprentice? Were those the first bits of paint ever put up on a wall by Michelangelo?

Michelangelo was thirteen when he joined Ghirlandaio’s studio and helped decorate that chapel—two years older than I when orphaned, but still young. His detractors could dismiss him as a “lowly stonecutter,” but he’d trained as a painter under one of the greatest frescoists Florence has ever known. Michelangelo knew how to paint.

As darkness fell, I jogged back across town to my studio. I opened the front door—wiping my feet twice before crossing the threshold—and slipped into the storefront of my workshop. I sidestepped buckets and rope and rags and jars and brushes; my men kept the space so cluttered. Have you ever heard Michelangelo moan about such a bottega? He makes it clear that he finds the idea of assistants working together to execute the designs of a single master abhorrent: “Churning out piece after piece, all based off designs by a single master, no imagination, no time to innovate, and for what? To sell? To whom? Merchants and clinging gentry?” Beh, when everyone can regularly secure lucrative commissions from cathedrals and city councils like him, then none of us will need our little retail shops. But until then . . . I ducked through a back door.

This was my private space, where I worked on designs for the bottega and on commissions for those paying a high enough price for a painting by my own hand: the wealthy Doni family, my duke in Urbino, an emissary to the King of England (still Henry VII at the time, at least for another—what? Four or five years?). Back in this part of the studio, things were organized: brushes in impeccable rows arranged by bristle size; jars of pigment organized by tint, tone, and shade; stacks of treated panels grouped by wood type; and drawings cataloged in neat stacks by subject matter. And hanging on walls, leaning in chairs, and propped on stands were my paintings: Madonna after Madonna after Madonna.