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details on a small Nativity . Two men seized him by the arms and dragged him before Antonino the Good, Bishop of Florence, where the painter was pronounced guilty almost before he could protest, and sentenced to a punishment of thirty lashes.
    Stunned, he’d been carried directly into the jail and stripped of his robe. The monk’s pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears, and the lash cut into his back cruelly. Afterward he was thrown into a cell, where he composed elaborate altarpiece designs in his head and dreamed of his mother’s face, picturing her as the Virgin of his altarpieces, the Madonna of his private heaven, to keep himself from despair. On the fourth day of his imprisonment, Fra Filippo was awakened from a troubled sleep by a jailer who thrust before him a scroll containing the signature and wax seal of Cosimo de’ Medici.
    â€œGet up,” the jailer said. “You’re leaving.”
    Fra Filippo was eternally indebted to Cosimo. The powerful patron had saved his skin and paid his debts. He’d arranged for the painter to return to his work on the Prato frescoes, and helped in his appointment as chaplain of Santa Margherita.
    Now, Cosimo and his son, Giovanni, wanted results. They wanted what Fra Filippo had promised: a glorious and newly imagined composition of the Madonna worshiping her babe in nature, in the forest, as no one had ever painted Mother and Child before. The idea was there, the sketches made. But the fulfillment of this vision required inspiration, and a work for the king of Naples demanded unsurpassed majesty to secure the future of Florence.
    Fra Filippo felt his stomach churn, and wished for a soothing infusion from the herb garden of Santa Margherita. Shaken, he turned his face toward the window and caught a view of the small panel with the Madonna’s face, her blue eyes.
    â€œLucrezia,” he whispered.
    The painter envisioned Lucrezia’s face on the altarpiece. He saw her ivory skin, her golden hair set under a delicate benda . He saw the Virgin kneeling in the woods, sunlight dappling the ground where the Child lay.
    The picture came alive in his head, so that he could almost hear the finches in the trees, smell the citrus and eucalyptus in the thick groves surrounding the virgin Lucrezia. Of course, Lucrezia was the answer to his prayers. If she could grace the central panel of his triptych for the Medici, the painter knew he could complete it with all the glory worthy of a king.
    But as Fra Filippo meditated on the scene, it seemed to dissolve into an abyss.
    To paint the Virgin in the forest, as he imagined her, Fra Filippowould need to gaze upon Lucrezia’s face in full daylight. He would need her to sit for him as a model sat for a master, in his studio, where his paints and pigments and the heavy wooden panels were at his disposal during the high morning sun. He would need the impossible, for truly this would be not only difficult but improper. Unless he could make a plea to the prioress, and offer her something formidable in return for her consent, a novitiate would never be permitted to visit him here in his bottega .
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    P rioress Bartolommea de’ Bovacchiesi was having a hard week. The rain wasn’t plentiful, late summer sun was baking the ground, and she feared the convent’s vegetable garden wouldn’t yield a bountiful harvest. She’d received notice from Florence that Prior General Saviano would be spending eight nights in their hostel before and after the Festa della Sacra Cintola, and preparations had to be made. In addition, Sister Simona had broken out in a rash of strange pustules and been replaced in the kitchen by Sister Bernadetta, who had neither the skill nor the patience for turning out perfect rolls or rich black bread.
    Dipping her stylus in a pot of ink, the prioress looked out the small window of her study and saw a large white mass moving toward her building.
    â€œ Benedicte, Mother,” Fra Filippo