Ref.
1508-05-08

§1

The client engaged a sculptor. The instrument of 8 May 1508 commits him to paint, in fresco, the vault of a chapel already standing. Two days later he signed for 500 ducats against that work and entered his own trade on the receipt: sculptor.

§2

The money is not the finding. The version in which the patron never paid does not survive the ledger — the advance is dated two days after the contract. Whatever was wrong with this arrangement was wrong somewhere a payment schedule does not reach.

§3

He worked upright, on scaffolding, head tipped back under the surface he was painting. He was not lying on his back; that was supplied later, by people who were not in the room. The only site report in his own hand is a comic poem written during the job, and it is not flattering about the position.

§4

The programme was phased. The first half was complete by August 1510, with the work stopping and starting around that point. Accounts that run it as one unbroken stretch have flattened a schedule into an anecdote.

§5

Two of the lines most often quoted of him — the angel waiting inside the block, the old man still learning — appear nowhere in anything he wrote. They were attached afterwards, and they were attached because they are comfortable. An assessment that admits them has stopped assessing.

§6

Determination: the commission was feasible and the fit was wrong, and those are separate findings. The ceiling exists. The receipt still says sculptor. Most of what is remembered about how those two facts were reconciled was invented afterwards, in the direction that makes the work easier to admire and the job easier to forget.