In 1401 a 15-year-old boy in Pistoia was in legal trouble for drawing blood from a German man with a heavy stick. That boy, the son of a wool stretcher with a violent past of his own, was Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello. This episode pieces together the life of one of history’s greatest sculptors, from his trip to Rome with Filippo Brunelleschi to dig up and reverse-engineer ancient ruins, to the goldsmith work that taught him lost-wax casting and metal chasing on a microscopic scale.

Back in Florence, Donatello learned to sculpt optical illusions for statues placed high on Orsanmichele and the cathedral, and tricked the Linen Weavers’ Guild into approving his St. Mark by pretending to fix it for two weeks. We explore his shallow-relief stiacciato technique, the Medici patronage that shielded him from the guilds and from his own hopeless finances, the erotic and politically loaded bronze David, the engineering nightmare of the Gattamelata equestrian monument in Padua, and the raw, emaciated wooden Penitent Magdalene that alienated the public in his final years before his death in 1466.

• Why two young Florentines digging in Roman dirt resemble founders in a Silicon Valley garage
• How distorted proportions look perfect from fifty feet below
• A basket of cash on a pulley and an artist who never tracked expenses
• Why vulnerability, not armor, was the Medici’s intimidation tactic
• What it takes to abandon what made you successful for what makes you truthful