Oh, the way she brushed my hair out of my eyes . . . “Dai, he won’t notice if I’m gone for a moment.” She slipped out the door and into the hall.

“If you went missing, I’d notice in a blink.”

She shook her head but offered her elbow.

Up in Margherita’s room—no bigger than the pigment closet in my old Florentine workshop—she closed the door behind us and started untying her bodice. “We only have a minute.”

I took her hands and said, “Spending only a brief time on such divinity would be worse than spending only one day painting an altarpiece. I prefer to wait until I have unlimited time, my lady.” (And if you believe that, then I have an ancient statue of a sleeping cupid I’d like to sell you.)

As she relaced her bodice and I straightened the trifles on her cabinet—hair combs and tweezers, vermillion for lip pigment, and powders made of white lead and mercury—I told her how I’d unveiled my work that day, and how the other painters were fired, and I’d been hired to decorate the papal apartments by myself, and how the pope told me that he wanted each of the four walls of his library to correspond to a different subject of his books—one for Religion, one for Law & Virtue, a third for Poetry, a fourth for Philosophy—and how I wanted to use one of those walls to finally paint the world’s first perfect painting.

She said, “Where would you even start to accomplish such a thing?”

I opened my mouth to tell her that I would start by perfecting my fresco technique on the ceiling, and then perfecting composition and perspective on the Religion wall, shadow and balance on Law & Virtue, color and rhythm with Poetry, and then put it all together on my Philosophy wall, all painted directly into wet plaster in perfect buon fresco—not a single mistake corrected in a secco on the dry wall—with every brushstroke perfectly applied, and thereby create a painting so perfect that it would bend the Vatican, bend the city, bend the peninsula, bend the entire world toward beauty. But instead of saying all of that, I took a deep breath and said, “Where do I start? I have no idea.”

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIII