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Raphael painted me in the lower-left of his fresco, writing in a book, young men looking over my shoulder. He put me near Euclid and beside a tablet showing the musical ratios: the tetractys, the proportions of the octave, the fourth, the fifth. He understood what I taught: that number is not a tool for measuring things but the substance of which things are made.

I was also a religious leader, a founder of a way of life, a man who taught that the soul is immortal and that eating beans was forbidden. Raphael left out the beans. Posterity has also mostly left them out. People prefer the mathematics.