I’d lived most of my life in Urbino. Have you been? Yes, it’s remote—a walled city on the eastern edge of the Apennines, takes several days to get there—but worth the trip. Terraced hills, cypress trees, Roman ruins. After a winter snow, the sky turns lavender with a little extra blue—ultramarine, not azurite—and the buildings glow in shades of copper, rust, and ale. When you visit, don’t miss the Ducal Palace. With its bell tower and dome prominently positioned high upon the hill, it looks more like a church than a palace, which is appropriate because in many ways our court is our religion. When you think of the peninsula’s great courts, you think of Milan, Venice, and Ferrara, don’t you? Va bene, but don’t forget Urbino. Our court was and still is a paragon of poetry, fashion, and jousting of swords and words alike. It’s also the court where my father served.

Giovanni Santi spent his days making pretty pictures for the duke and his nights teaching me to make pretty pictures of my own. Before I could walk, I used to sit atop his feet as he swayed back and forth while painting. I learned the rhythm of the paint through those feet.

What I remember most about my father’s death was his paint-brush. It wasn’t a family heirloom. The duke hadn’t bestowed it during some special ceremony. My father hadn’t made it; he never made his own brushes. He’d probably picked it up at some market or another. It had a long, wooden handle splattered with dried specks of indigo and lead-tin yellow. The bristles were extralong horsehair and caked with malachite green. The apothecary tried to take that brush from his hand, but my father wouldn’t let go.

A nun nudged me into the room. It smelled of poppies, earwax, and blood—the scents of men trying to cure things that can’t be cured. The windows were covered with red velvet curtains—red like ochre, not orange like vermillion. I wondered, why shut out the sun if you’re only going to light so many candles? The room was crowded, not only with doctors and nuns, but furniture. My mother had crammed too many tables, chairs, and chests into the house, and my father hadn’t removed a single piece, not even after she died.

Three years before, when my mother and sister got sick, I hadn’t known what the word “deathbed” meant, but by age eleven, I was old enough to understand.

“You weren’t born on Good Friday for nothing,” my father said, taking my fingers in the same hand as the paintbrush. The wooden handle dug into my flesh. “God wouldn’t have blessed you with such charm and talent unless you were destined to rise.”