Do you know the punishment for traitors in ancient Rome? Damnatio Memoriae. A person’s name, likeness, every reference removed from monuments, buildings, historical records. Erase the memory of a man, erase the man himself. I know what you’re thinking: at least the Romans never succeeded in erasing a whole man, right? But I ask you this: if they did it correctly, how would we ever know?

Chapter XX

Chapter XX

Now that I had a place to sleep, it was time to find a proper plaster mix, and Margherita Luti was right: no more waiting around for someone else to rescue me. So, every day, I tested plaster after plaster, mixing in more sand, more lime, less water. I slathered patch after patch of plaster onto my small section of ceiling, the smell of wet sand becoming nauseating as, every morning, the patches remained damp. A few weeks in, suffering from insufficient food—my maid had a harder time slipping me scraps now that I no longer lived in Bramante’s rooms and the cooling weather meant fewer bites of bread left on windowsills for sparrows—I had some midnight delirium and decided that perhaps the mix needed more water, not less, so I arrived in the apartments the next morning determined to mix a plaster so wet you’d thicken it to drink. I absentmindedly touched the first patch I’d left drying overnight: still damp. Maybe I should leave the lime out completely. Second patch: mushy. Maybe the recipe didn’t call for sand at all. The third patch: dry. Was there some special ingredient in the water or . . .

Wait. Could it be . . . ?

I reached back up. Dry.

I pressed my hand against the plaster and came away clean. I licked it: chalky with not a hint of salt. (Sodoma watched me with horror, and at noon, he pretended he wasn’t hungry and let me eat his entire helping of bread and beans.) I mixed that same plaster recipe in three separate buckets—six full parts drier than Florentine—and daubed one patch where the ceiling caught the most shade, another on the sunniest spot, and a final in the middle. All three patches remained pliable all day and dried hard as marble by morning.