When I was a boy—I had to have been, what? Seven?—I’d never seen a beggar before. There weren’t any in Urbino, as we were a small enough city to take care of our own. But one spring, my parents took me to Venice. My father was picking up pigments from the best vendicolori on the peninsula, and he thought it would be beneficial to expose me to all those colors. (We took a boat out to Murano, too, to watch the glassmakers work the furnaces, making emerald green goblets and blue vases with threads of gold and glass flasks painted with jesters and kings. That was the first time that I realized there were other crafts like painting with studios and assistants, special tools, special processes, special languages . . .) We were walking back to the inn after supper—over a little curved bridge, my father’s torch reflecting in the canal—when my mother dropped a coin in the hands of a beggar woman wearing tattered clothes, holding a baby wrapped in a muddy-brown woolen blanket. I whined, “But I could’ve used that to buy blue,” and my mother bent down and told me, “It’s nice when you have things that you want, but only after everyone else has what they need.”

So, there I am, in the Sistine, silently arguing with my dead mother: “But Mamma, I need that ceiling.” “Yes, but, Michelangelo needs his marble, too.” And I’ll be blessed if I couldn’t see a way to get us both what we needed, so, out loud I said, “Your Holiness, you’re missing an opportunity if you dismiss Michelangelo today. This painting may be a mess, but it’s proof that he’s a sculptor. A painter lays out the scene first because that’s what painting needs; only once we find our composition do we populate it with figures. But Michelangelo will always focus on the people first, which is what you want in the sculptor of a great tomb filled with forty marble figures. You don’t have to choose between a tomb and a ceiling, Your Holiness. You can have both. Him marble, me paint.”

Did Pope Julius nod? Was that a gleam in his eye? Was he about to give me the Sistine, send Michelangelo back to his marble, give us both what we needed? He inhaled to speak and . . .

“I was wrong, Your Holiness,” said Bramante. “Michelangelo should keep the ceiling.”

“What?” I’m not sure which one of us said it or if all of us did.

“I overreacted,” Bramante continued. “No one should lose employment over such a minor setback. Anyone can provide Michelangelo with a proper plaster recipe. Santi is a wonderful craftsman, so, yes, it will probably take a miracle for Michelangelo to beat him in paint, but don’t you—and this chapel—deserve a miracle, Your Holiness?”