In the late 1990s, restorers cleaning the choir gallery of the Sistine Chapel uncovered a name scratched into the stone: Josquin. This episode pieces together the fragmented life of Josquin Desprez, the Renaissance composer born around 1450 to 1455 in French-speaking Flanders, son of a brutal local policeman, heir to relatives likely killed when a town was burned during a siege by Louis XI, and quite possibly the man who carved graffiti into the pope's private chapel.

The hosts follow Josquin from the Sforza court in Milan to the papal choir in Rome and the court of Duke Ercole d'Este in Ferrara, where a talent scout warned that he composed only when inspired and demanded 200 ducats, nearly double the salary asked by Heinrich Isaac. They explain his break from medieval melisma, his equal-voiced imitative polyphony in Ave Maria virgo serena, ...