You lean back to stare at a palace ceiling and see a round opening to the bright blue sky, with people peering down and a potted plant teetering on the ledge. Your brain screams at you to step back. But reach up and the ceiling is completely flat. There is no hole. It is all paint, a magnificent hack of the human visual system.

We decode the life of Andrea Mantegna, the brilliant, arrogant, and notoriously difficult carpenter's son who engineered optical illusion in fine art centuries before cameras existed. From a Roman-obsessed tailor's art sweatshop to the courts of Mantua and the Vatican, we trace how his uncompromising stony style and mathematical perspective reshaped Western visual culture.

• How an antiquity-hoarding tailor named Squarcione hardwired Mantegna's brain to revere ancient Rome, then later mocked his work
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