Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known simply as Michelangelo, lived from March 1475 to February 1564. He was a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet during the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, he spent most of his career after his thirties in Rome. His art drew heavily on classical antiquity and left a deep mark on Western art. His wide-ranging skill across different creative fields makes him a classic example of a Renaissance man, much like his older rival Leonardo da Vinci. Because so many of his letters, sketches, and personal records survive, he is among the best-documented artists of the 1500s. Writers of his own time praised him as the greatest artist of his age.

Michelangelo became famous early in life. He sculpted two of his most famous works, the Pietà and David, before turning thirty. Though he did not see himself as a painter, he produced two of the most influential frescoes in Western art: the Genesis scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. His design for the Laurentian Library helped start the Mannerist style in architecture. At age seventy-one, he took over as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica after Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. He changed the plan so that the western end was built to his design, and the dome was finished after his death, with some changes.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist to have his biography published while he was still alive. Three biographies came out during his lifetime. One, by Giorgio Vasari, claimed that Michelangelo's work surpassed every artist, living or dead, and that he was supreme not just in one art but in all three.

People often called him Il Divino, or "the divine one." His contemporaries admired his terribilità—his power to fill viewers with awe. Later artists who tried to copy the intense physicality of his style helped create Mannerism, a short-lived movement between the High Renaissance and the Baroque.

**Early life and career**

**Early life, 1475–1488**

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, now called Caprese Michelangelo, a small town near Arezzo in Tuscany. His family had been small-scale bankers in Florence for generations, but the bank failed, and his father Ludovico briefly took a government job in Caprese. At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the town's judicial administrator and podestà of Chiusi della Verna. His mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarrotis claimed to be descended from Countess Matilde di Canossa—a claim that was never proven, but Michelangelo believed it.

A few months after his birth, the family moved back to Florence, where he grew up. During his mother's long illness and after her death in 1481, when he was six, Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, a stonecutter, in Settignano. His father owned a marble quarry and a small farm there. The young boy developed his love for working with marble. As Vasari quotes him: "If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures."

**Apprenticeships, 1488–1492**

As a boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. He showed no interest in school, preferring to copy paintings from churches and spend time with other painters. Florence was then Italy's greatest center for arts and learning. Art was sponsored by the town council, merchant guilds, and wealthy patrons like the Medici. The Renaissance, a revival of Classical learning and art, had first blossomed in Florence. In the early 1400s, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, after studying Classical ruins in Rome, had built two churches, San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, that followed Classical principles. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent fifty years creating the bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo later called "The Gates of Paradise." The exterior niches of the Church of Orsanmichele held works by Florence's top sculptors: Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. Older churches were covered with frescos, mostly Late Medieval and Early Renaissance, begun by Giotto and continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel. Michelangelo studied and copied both artists' works in his drawings.

During Michelangelo's childhood, a team of painters was called from Florence to the Vatican to decorate the Sistine Chapel walls. Among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master of fresco, perspective, figure drawing, and portraiture, who ran the largest workshop in Florence. In 1488, at age thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father convinced Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was unusual for someone so young. In 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils. Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.

From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Platonic Academy, a Humanist academy founded by the Medici. There, his work and thinking were shaped by many leading philosophers and writers of the day, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano.