The night my father finally slipped into the great sea, I returned to his studio—my studio. His assistants had packed up their things and left. The maestro was dead, they had families to support, and a boy of eleven couldn’t help. They’d taken everything: jars of paint, stacks of panels, ropes, tarps, two studio chickens, all gone. The little they’d left was a mess. Empty bottles toppled over, bristleless paintbrushes strewn across the floor, a three-legged chair leaning against an old wooden table. I looked for a bucket of water, but those were gone, too. Kneeling in the doorway, I took my father’s long-handled paintbrush out of my pocket (in real life, I’d pried that brush out of my father’s rigid fingers as a priest tried to drag me away while I wept, not an ideal scene at all). I dipped that brush into a puddle of muddy rainwater and scrubbed the bristles. I scrubbed and scrubbed but still couldn’t make the green tint disappear.

At the funeral (a gracious affair for which I would still owe the duke and duchess a great debt, if they were still alive to accept it), I thanked the Duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, for gifting me with one of my father’s best paintings—a Virgin and Child, beautifully framed. The next morning, the duke sent me to apprentice for the greatest painter in our region, Pietro Perugino. My father had used mainly tempera paints for his panel pictures, but Perugino taught me to stop mixing pigments with egg and start mixing them with linseed oil instead. Perugino helped me master oil paints—the medium of the future, of the great Northerners, of Leonardo da Vinci. Tempera is thin; oils are rich. Tempera dries fast; oils slow. Tempera relies on flat blocks of color, while oils live in shadow. I went to bed late, rose early, and mixed so many colors that my mortar and pestle began to wear thin.

When I was fourteen, Perugino agreed to take me to Florence to study the masters. I thought I was so important, crossing those mountains on that slow six-day ride. I’d heard the rumors that Florence had fallen on dark times. The Medici family had been the de facto rulers of Florence for—what? Over a hundred years? After they were exiled, someone had to fill the power vacancy, so in strode that madman friar. Whereas the Medici had preached the gospel of greed, that friar parabled poverty and the wrath of God. But I didn’t take the warnings seriously. No preacher, no matter how good, could preach a city like Florence out of its love of art.

I was wrong, sì certo.