I walked back to Piazza Scossacavalli, where I’d recently secured new apartments with my papal salary. (Thank Elizabeth that I didn’t have to sleep in the Borgia pope’s old apartments any longer. They’d treated me well, but they were cold, and I swear I could hear ghosts whispering.) I nodded hello to my staff and ascended the stairs. (While we’re on the subject, yes, my rooms are nice, but Michelangelo’s claim that I live like a prince is exaggerated. I am—as any good courtier should be—a paragon of moderation. Yes, I like nice furnishings and insist that window treatments be of pleasing colors, but it’s not as if I’d bought some ostentatious villa and filled it with gold leaf. My rooms were comfortable, but not princely, no matter what he says.) Up in the large salon I used as my private studio, I closed the door. Unlike the papal apartments, which were always chaotic—assistants scurrying in and out and the pope and his advisers always leaving war plans strewn about—my private studio was immaculate: brushes in neat rows, jars of pigment organized by color, and drawings catalogued in tidy stacks. Hanging on walls and propped on stands were my paintings—Madonnas mainly—which I worked on in my spare time to quiet my mind.

But today, I didn’t have time for Madonnas.

Evangelista had recently shipped yet another trunk down to Rome, containing some of my old sketchbooks. I hadn’t had time to organize them yet and thought the activity might provide a useful distraction. I found drawings from when I was young—awkward but with a hint of beauty in some—and notebook after notebook from my years in Perugino’s studio: copies of every one of the maestro’s masterpieces, but also copies of paintings by Signorelli, Piero della Francesco, Castegno . . . Then came the years in Città di Castello when I started stepping into my own style. I spent so long marveling over a stack of preparatory drawings for my Baronci altarpiece that darkness fell. I lit candles. Next came piles of drawings from Florence: copies of Leonardos, Botticellis, Donatellos, and, yes, Michelangelos . . . There were copies of one of Andrea della Robbia’s blue-and-white ceramics—a delicate Crucifixion with beautiful winged angels—and I remembered Sarto and me sitting at its base, trying to see which one of us could copy it best. That’s when I flipped to another page and . . .