In 1884, as bailiffs marched to the door of a bankrupt family in Livorno, Italy, the mother went into labor, and an ancient law protecting the bed of a woman giving birth allowed the family to pile its remaining valuables on top of her. The child born that day was Amedeo Modigliani, and this episode explores the brief, tragic and fiercely original life of an artist whose elongated portraits now sell for hundreds of millions while he died destitute at 35.

We follow his childhood battles with pleurisy, typhoid and tuberculosis, the fever dream that led his mother to enroll him in art classes, his philosophical rejection of landscape painting under Nietzsche's influence, and his 1906 arrival in Paris as a dapper bourgeois who within a year became the cursed Modi. We unpack the modern view that his public drunkenness was camouflage for a contag ...