Five hundred years ago, the mayor of Florence found himself with an enormous block of marble that no sculptor would touch.
A previous sculptor had bored a cannonball-sized hole through the middle of the marble, right where the figure’s legs were supposed to be.
In hopes of salvaging the stone, Mayor Piero Soderini wrote to every sculptor he could think of. Nobody would come near it. Not even Leonardo da Vinci.
Fortunately, there was one sculptor who was up for the challenge.