9. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

At the age of 8, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the child prodigy, was presented to the Pope - who prophetically announced that the child would be the Michelangelo of his age. Bernini would not only raise the sculpted human figure to unseen levels of realism, but he would dominate the 17th century like no other, as a painter, an architect, as a playwright and of course as a sculptor, and come to be seen as the embodiment of the age of the baroque.