The pope ordered all the other frescoes in his papal apartments chipped off the ceilings to make way for mine, but I insisted on saving the best: Sodoma’s panel of Marsyas challenging Apollo to a duel on a lute, sì certo (remember, tickle, tickle? Still makes me laugh); many of the grotesques that Lotto, Signorelli, and Bramantino had put on their ceiling; and every part touched by Perugino’s brush. (Regardless of what the maestro may think of me, he was my teacher.) I saved those paintings because they deserved to be saved, but the act also helped me in an unexpected way: it made me such a hero that some of the other fired painters returned and offered to join my workshop as assistants. Even though the pope had fired them, His Holiness didn’t prohibit their return: “We have no opinions on assistants; we leave such minor decisions up to the maestro.” So, I welcomed into my workshop the Frenchman Guillaume de Marcillat (originally trained in stained glass, so a brilliant colorist), Sodoma (when he agreed to join, he negotiated a higher salary; he’s not as foolish as you might imagine), and yes, even Lorenzo Lotto (who used to spit off the scaffolding at me every day).

“I hear Michelangelo’s using pozzolana instead of sand in his plaster mix,” Lotto said one day, as he added a ruled grid over the top of one of my preparatory drawings.

“Je suis surpris he’s not using marble dust,” chided Guillaume, using a piece of chalk to enlarge one square of a preparatory drawing onto a larger page by a factor of five.

“Maybe Michelangelo knows something we don’t,” Sodoma chimed in, as he ran a tracing wheel along an already-enlarged drawing, incising each line of that drawing with thousands of tiny holes. “Maybe we should try it, too.”

“Let Michelangelo use volcanic ash if he wants,” I said, using a bag of charcoal to pounce dust over the incised holes of another cartoon to leave an imprint of the design in a patch of wet plaster. While the others were working on the floor, I was up the scaffolding preparing to paint a new giornata. “We’ll stick with river sand.” The plaster mix we were using for the ceiling had been drying into an impeccably smooth surface. “We can’t waste time chasing trends. There’s nothing more perfect than perfect.”

I saw the others exchange looks, but no one argued. They never argued back then. No matter how often I told them not to call me maestro—that we were all maestros in those rooms—they treated me like their boss. Is there anything more tedious?

I would’ve forgotten all about our conversation about Michelangelo’s plaster mix except for what happened a few days later. I’d just finished the final giornata of the ceiling when Bramante burst into the library. “Your Holiness, Michelangelo has ruined the Sistine.”