HE WAS BORN THE SON OF A WOOL CARDER IN Florence in 1386. When he died on 13 December 1466, at the age of 80, he was the most famous sculptor in Italy and so overloaded with commissions that he failed to complete most of them, thereby upsetting and frustrating his many patrons.
His career was one of constant innovation: he was the first artist since antiquity to create a free-standing nude statue, as well as the first to cast in bronze a life-size equestrian monument. He was the first artist in any era to use accurate perspective in reliefs, the first to depict saints as individual characters rather than embodiments of
