Once those drawings went on display, thick crowds streamed in and out of city hall to gape, as we artists sat and copied. Foreigners split their time between the two cartoons equally, but those of us from Florence focused on Michelangelo’s—who knew when he might return and chase us all out? Andrea della Robbia always sat in the same place, just to the right of center. Sarto lay on his stomach, crumpling up page after page of his drawings. Davide Ghirlandaio paced. I—with my neat rows of chalk and sketch paper—was the first to arrive and the last to leave. Or at least that’s what I thought, until . . .

About two weeks after the drawings went on display, I entered the Great Hall to find the bottom right-hand corner of Michelangelo’s cartoon ripped away. The missing piece had been a brilliant bit of foreshortening of a naked soldier’s legs stretched out behind him. As the other artists filed in, I asked: “Where did it go?”

No one answered.

I could’ve sat down with everyone else and continued draw-ing—there was a palpable new sense of urgency; copy while you can—but instead, I left to report the incident. The Gonfaloniere didn’t take my meeting, but I left a note. For the next two nights, I camped out in the Great Hall, staying awake for nearly forty-eight hours straight—sketching, pacing, organizing Leonardo’s boxes of unordered supplies—but after two days of no incidents, I went home to rest, change clothes, scrub chalk residue off my fingers . . . When I returned, another corner of that cartoon was gone; this soldier had been kneeling next to the Arno, pulling on a sock. “Who’s stealing it?”

Andrea della Robbia moved to the left, but other than that, no one acknowledged the missing.