Yes, that Baglioni, made famous during the Red Wedding back in 1500. You’ve heard of it, right? During a family wedding, the nonruling half of the Baglioni staged a coup, trying to murder the ruling half of the family while they slept after too much wedding wine. The rebelling half killed many, but a few of the ruling half escaped to thwart the plot. Did you attend that wedding? I was invited as a potential portrait painter of the happy couple, but I didn’t leave my room during the massacre—only watched the horrors from my upstairs window in a local inn. A couple of years later, the widow Baglioni commissioned me to paint an altarpiece to honor her son, Grifonetto, killed during that infamous wedding. Was Grifonetto worthy of being honored? Depends on which side of the Baglioni family you’re on, I suppose. He was one of the rebelling half of the family, the one who cut out the groom’s heart and took a bite out of it before dragging the groom’s corpse through the streets. (I didn’t see the biting portion of the evening—only heard about it—but I did witness the dragging-the-dead-body-through-the-streets part from my perch.) Grifonetto’s surviving cousins eventually caught him and the other members of the rebelling family and flayed them all, too—right in that square beneath my window. After witnessing all of that gore, I had to wash my hands for an hour every day for the next month to feel like I’d cleaned off all the blood. When the widow Baglioni commissioned that altarpiece from me, she pressed her hands together in prayer and begged, “Per favore, Raphael, make me remember my son’s goodness.”

Make me remember him as he should’ve been instead of as he was.

I’ll wager that you didn’t realize that one of my earliest masterpieces was a tribute to an assassin, did you? And here you thought you knew me so well.