This is a great self-contained piece of historical fiction, rooted in primary source truths.

Tucked away, a few chapters in, is the revelation that the title is a charge for Michaelangelo to conquere someone:

You conquer people by telling them of battles, king, elephants and marvelous beings.

later:

Tell them about all of that, and they will love you; they will make you the equal of a god. But you will know, since you are here pressed against me, you ill-smelling Frank whom chance has brought to my hands, you will know that all is nothing but a perfumed veil hiding the eternal suffering of night.

Michaelangelo's trip to Istanbul is viewed as a possible defection by the pope who had commissioned him for a mausoleum, but had been delinquent in providing materials, thus stringing him along.

He works a little on the tomb of Julius Della Rovere, the intransigent Pope whio ten years earlier, while still a cardinal, led the Vatican troops against Bayezid's Janissaries in southern Italy. Michaelangelo has met the two enemies, one after the other, and offered the first a mausoleum, the other a bridge.

the trope of troubled artist is done so well:

Constantinople is a very sweet prison

Mesihi the drunk student of the grand vizier who loves the sculptor saves him from the Andalusian assassin, but Michaelangelo views it as an act of jealousy for his refusal to requite. Beautifully tragic.

Attached to the end of the book is a sketch of the design for the bridge. The epilogue tells of the great earthquake which would destroy everything that had been erected thus far as well as the fate of Mesihi:

The destitute poet, drunk and without a protector, killed himself even before the famous ceiling where God gives life to an Adam whose face so resembles that of the Turkish poet was finished.

Other nice critcism:

His characters speak of Art and Beauty sincerely, with the reverence of capitalization, but their choices leave them lonely and isolated, like a chapter only a paragraph in length, dwarfed by the surrounding emptiness of the page. ... Hands that don't quite touch, a bridge destroyed before it could reach across the river, words unspoken and love unrequited

Fun ao+

Leonardo's drawing obsesses him. It is vertiginous, but flawed. Empty. Lifeless. Lacking ideals. Decidedly Leonardo takes himself for Archimedes and forgets beauty. Beauty comes from abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present. Michaelangelo is not an engineer. He is a sculptor. They sent him so that a form could be born from matter, be drawn, be revealed.

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