Piero Manzoni was one of the most radically inventive artists of the twentieth century whose work continues to challenge the definitions of artistic sovereignty and virtuosity to this day.

Immediately upon his death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Piero Manzoni’s reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist’s Shit, 1961, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before, and lay behind those thirty grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni’s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses.