Chapel Ceilings

Scattered throughout my little black notebooks are pieces of a story I made up about Michelangelo, the Renaissance painter. It takes place when he's older and stuck at a stuffy court banquet.

A snobby moralist is lamenting over the decline in art, spittle drying on chapped lips. "I mean, these artists, they paint prostitutes and bowls of fruit, of all things. What happened to the divine in art?" He gestures, sweeping his bored audience's attention to Michelangelo, "What happened to the Sistine Chapel?"

Michelangelo doesn't look up from the shapes he's drawing on the table with beads of spilled wine. "I could paint the Chapel," he says, "because I painted the pears and the prostitutes, all of them, like they belong on a chapel ceiling."

Most of this is in Italian, of course. And none of it actually happened.