“The Hanged Man” is streaming on Starz, Amazon Prime, and Blu-ray.

We’re introduced to Lorenzo de’ Medici (Elliot Cowan), the Magnificent ruler of Florence. Unlike the benevolent patron of history books, this Lorenzo is sharp, cynical, and pragmatic. He commissions a play mocking the rival Pazzi family. Leonardo, invited for his reputation, arrives late and proceeds to mock the Medici’s artistic pretensions. The tension is immediate: Lorenzo needs Leonardo’s genius, but hates his insolence.

The episode quickly establishes his core internal conflict: the suffocating limits of human knowledge. “I have known a hundred men who could paint the perfect Madonna,” he scoffs. “They bore me.” This line is the thesis of the episode. Leonardo is not motivated by piety or patronage, but by an insatiable, almost desperate curiosity. The central symbol of the episode—the tarot card of The Hanged Man —becomes a metaphor for his state of being. In tarot, the Hanged Man represents suspension, sacrifice, and seeing the world from a new perspective. Leonardo is metaphorically hanged by his own intellect, caught between the earthly demands of Florence (his debts, his rivalries) and the vertical pull of his heavenly ambitions.

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Leonardo’s talents attract the attention of the ruthless ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici (Elliot Cowan). Lorenzo is under immense pressure to secure an alliance with the Duke of Milan to protect Florence from the encroaching armies of the Pope, Rodrigo Borgia. To secure this alliance, Lorenzo needs a gift of immeasurable value. He commissions Leonardo to create a masterpiece: a massive bronze statue of a horse for the Duke's father.

Visually, the show is lush. Florence is a labyrinth of mud, marble, and shadow. The costumes are gritty, not pristine. The camera loves Leonardo’s sketchbooks, swirling from charcoal lines to moving machinery in a signature effect that sells his genius as a form of magic.

Each of these forces tries to claim or control Leonardo’s genius. Lorenzo offers patronage but demands loyalty; the Church demands submission; Verrocchio demands obedience. Leonardo’s rebellion against each of them is the engine of the plot. The episode’s climax—Leonardo’s public demonstration of his “spring cannon” (a primitive tank) at the Battle of the Mills—is a masterstroke of characterization. He builds a weapon of war not out of malice, but out of intellectual curiosity, only to realize too late that he has become a pawn. The horrified look on his face when the cannon fires is not moral cowardice; it is the horror of a creator seeing his pure idea corrupted by human violence.