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Illustration Credits: Sketch of two bearded male heads, faint and expressive, drawn in dark lines on aged paper. Drawings by Michelangelo in the secret room under the new sacristy of the Medici chapel in the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence. Photo: Claudio Giovannini / AFP via Getty Images.

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The artist squirreled himself away in an underground chamber, doodling as he hid.

In the art world, it has always been about who you know, not what you know. And who Michelangelo knew almost cost him his life.

The Medici were a powerful Florentine banking family who ruled Florence as a political dynasty. With their amassed fortune, they became major patrons of the arts, commissioning some of art history’s most famous works of art—from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1440–45) to Botticelli’s The The Birth of Venus (1485–86), to many of Florence’s most recognizable buildings, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Vecchio. After around 100 years of ruling the city, the Medici were toppled in a populist revolt and banished from Florence in 1527.

The banishment didn’t last for long, and they were reinstated in 1530. But while they were away, another betrayal had taken place.

Michelangelo was a favorite of the Medici; the family played a major role in bankrolling the artist in his younger years while he established himself as one of Florence’s most prestigious artistic talents. As a teenager, he studied at the Platonic Academy, founded by the family, while living in the Medici court. He benefitted throughout his career from their benefaction on several significant commissions including the tomb of Pope Julius II and The Last Judgement (1535–41) fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

While the Medici were exiled, a violent siege of Florence ensued in 1529. Michelangelo, dedicated to the his home state, worked with the new Republican government as a supervisor of the city’s fortifications.

Pope Clement VII (Giulio De Medici, the second of four Medici popes) saw Michelangelo’s work with the Republic as a direct slight on his family, who had so generously supported him for all those years. After all, he was now working with the very people who had demanded the Medici be banished from Florence. He expressed his displeasure in the strongest possible terms: a death sentence for the 55-year-old artist in 1530.

So, what was Michelangelo to do? He hid. He had been carrying out works at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, one of Florence’s largest churches and the home of the Medici tombs, and its prior, Giovan Battista Figiovanni, found the artist a place to hide.

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Verity Babbs is an art critic-comedian and presenter from Northampton, UK. She graduated with a history of art degree from the University of Oxford and has collaborated on projects with Tate, the National Gallery, Soho House, the National Film and Television School, and Royal Museums Greenwich.