Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved marble that looks like breathing flesh and built the sacred spaces of 17th-century Rome, yet he also chased his younger brother Luigi through the streets with an iron crowbar and ordered a servant to slash his mistress’s face with a razor. This episode examines how a child prodigy, tested by Pope Paul V at age eight and proclaimed the Michelangelo of his age, invented the theatrical Baroque style while living a personal life of violence and hubris.

We trace his rise under Cardinal Scipione Borghese and Pope Urban VIII, the 98-foot bronze Baldacchino in St. Peter’s, the affair with Costanza that ended in a broken-ribbed brother and a disfigured woman who was jailed while Bernini was quietly pardoned. Then comes the fall: cracked bell towers at St. Peter’s, rival Francesco Borromini, demolition and disgrace under Pope Innocent X, and the silver model of the Four Rivers Fountain that Bernini slipped past the papal ban to win his way back.

• How undercutting and polishing made Pluto’s fingers press into Proserpina’s marble thigh
• Why Bernini designed sculptures to be seen against walls, forcing viewers into the climax of the story
• The hidden yellow-glass window and bel composto staging behind the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
• The disastrous 1665 trip to design the Louvre for Louis XIV, undone by ego, plumbing, and clashing aesthetics
• The elephant obelisk whose rear end may be a permanent stone insult aimed at the Dominican friars