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 P ...