biography of michelangelo di lodovico buonarroti simoni

Michelangelo

Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo created the 'David' and 'Pieta' sculptures and the Sistine Chapel and 'Last Judgment' paintings.

(1475-1564)

Who Was Michelangelo?

What followed was a remarkable career as an artist, famed in his own time for his artistic virtuosity. Although he always considered himself a Florentine, Michelangelo lived most of his life in Rome, where he died at age 88.

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy, the second of five sons.

When Michelangelo was born, his father, Leonardo di Buonarrota Simoni, was briefly serving as a magistrate in the small village of Caprese. The family returned to Florence when Michelangelo was still an infant.

His mother, Francesca Neri, was ill, so Michelangelo was placed with a family of stonecutters, where he later jested, "With my wet-nurse's milk, I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues."

Indeed, Michelangelo was less interested in schooling than watching the painters at nearby churches and drawing what he saw, according to his earliest biographers (Vasari, Condivi and Varchi). It may have been his grammar school friend, Francesco Granacci, six years his senior, who introduced Michelangelo to painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Michelangelo's father realized early on that his son had no interest in the family financial business, so he agreed to apprentice him, at the age of 13, to Ghirlandaio and the Florentine painter's fashionable workshop. There, Michelangelo was exposed to the technique of fresco (a mural painting technique where pigment is placed directly on fresh, or wet, lime plaster).

Medici Family

From 1489 to 1492, Michelangelo studied classical sculpture in the palace gardens of Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici of the powerful Medici family. This extraordinary opportunity opened to him after spending only a year at Ghirlandaio’s workshop, at his mentor’s recommendation.

This was a fertile time for Michelangelo; his years with the family permitted him access to the social elite of Florence — allowing him to study under the respected sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and exposing him to prominent poets, scholars and learned humanists.

He also obtained special permission from the Catholic Church to study cadavers for insight into anatomy, though exposure to corpses had an adverse effect on his health.

These combined influences laid the groundwork for what would become Michelangelo's distinctive style: a muscular precision and reality combined with an almost lyrical beauty. Two relief sculptures that survive, "Battle of the Centaurs" and "Madonna Seated on a Step," are testaments to his phenomenal talent at the tender age of 16.

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Move to Rome

Political strife in the aftermath of Lorenzo de' Medici’s death led Michelangelo to flee to Bologna, where he continued his study. He returned to Florence in 1495 to begin work as a sculptor, modeling his style after masterpieces of classical antiquity.

There are several versions of an intriguing story about Michelangelo's famed "Cupid" sculpture, which was artificially "aged" to resemble a rare antique: One version claims that Michelangelo aged the statue to achieve a certain patina, and another version claims that his art dealer buried the sculpture (an "aging" method) before attempting to pass it off as an antique.

Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio bought the "Cupid" sculpture, believing it as such, and demanded his money back when he discovered he'd been duped. Strangely, in the end, Riario was so impressed with Michelangelo's work that he let the artist keep the money. The cardinal even invited the artist to Rome, where Michelangelo would live and work for the rest of his life.

Personality

Though Michelangelo's brilliant mind and copious talents earned him the regard and patronage of the wealthy and powerful men of Italy, he had his share of detractors.

He had a contentious personality and quick temper, which led to fractious relationships, often with his superiors. This not only got Michelangelo into trouble, it created a pervasive dissatisfaction for the painter, who constantly strived for perfection but was unable to compromise.

He sometimes fell into spells of melancholy, which were recorded in many of his literary works: "I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow/my repose are these discomforts," he once wrote.

In his youth, Michelangelo had taunted a fellow student, and received a blow on the nose that disfigured him for life. Over the years, he suffered increasing infirmities from the rigors of his work; in one of his poems, he documented the tremendous physical strain that he endured by painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Political strife in his beloved Florence also gnawed at him, but his most notable enmity was with fellow Florentine artist Leonardo da Vinci , who was more than 20 years his senior.

Poetry and Personal Life

Michelangelo's poetic impulse, which had been expressed in his sculptures, paintings and architecture, began taking literary form in his later years.

Although he never married, Michelangelo was devoted to a pious and noble widow named Vittoria Colonna, the subject and recipient of many of his more than 300 poems and sonnets. Their friendship remained a great solace to Michelangelo until Colonna's death in 1547.

Soon after Michelangelo's move to Rome in 1498, the cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, a representative of the French King Charles VIII to the pope, commissioned "Pieta," a sculpture of Mary holding the dead Jesus across her lap.

Michelangelo, who was just 25 years old at the time, finished his work in less than one year, and the statue was erected in the church of the cardinal's tomb. At 6 feet wide and nearly as tall, the statue has been moved five times since, to its present place of prominence at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Carved from a single piece of Carrara marble, the fluidity of the fabric, positions of the subjects, and "movement" of the skin of the Piet — meaning "pity" or "compassion" — created awe for its early viewers, as it does even today.

It is the only work to bear Michelangelo’s name: Legend has it that he overheard pilgrims attribute the work to another sculptor, so he boldly carved his signature in the sash across Mary's chest. Today, the "Pieta" remains a universally revered work.

Between 1501 and 1504, Michelangelo took over a commission for a statue of "David," which two prior sculptors had previously attempted and abandoned, and turned the 17-foot piece of marble into a dominating figure.

The strength of the statue's sinews, vulnerability of its nakedness, humanity of expression and overall courage made the "David" a highly prized representative of the city of Florence.

Originally commissioned for the cathedral of Florence, the Florentine government instead installed the statue in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now lives in Florence’s Accademia Gallery .

Sistine Chapel

Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo to switch from sculpting to painting to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the artist revealed on October 31, 1512. The project fueled Michelangelo’s imagination, and the original plan for 12 apostles morphed into more than 300 figures on the ceiling of the sacred space. (The work later had to be completely removed soon after due to an infectious fungus in the plaster, then recreated.)

Michelangelo fired all of his assistants, whom he deemed inept, and completed the 65-foot ceiling alone, spending endless hours on his back and guarding the project jealously until completion.

The resulting masterpiece is a transcendent example of High Renaissance art incorporating the symbology, prophecy and humanist principles of Christianity that Michelangelo had absorbed during his youth.

'Creation of Adam'

The vivid vignettes of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling produce a kaleidoscope effect, with the most iconic image being the " Creation of Adam," a famous portrayal of God reaching down to touch the finger of man.

Rival Roman painter Raphael evidently altered his style after seeing the work.

'Last Judgment'

Michelangelo unveiled the soaring "Last Judgment" on the far wall of the Sistine Chapel in 1541. There was an immediate outcry that the nude figures were inappropriate for so holy a place, and a letter called for the destruction of the Renaissance's largest fresco.

The painter retaliated by inserting into the work new portrayals: his chief critic as a devil and himself as the flayed St. Bartholomew.

Architecture

Although Michelangelo continued to sculpt and paint throughout his life, following the physical rigor of painting the Sistine Chapel he turned his focus toward architecture.

He continued to work on the tomb of Julius II, which the pope had interrupted for his Sistine Chapel commission, for the next several decades. Michelangelo also designed the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library — located opposite the Basilica San Lorenzo in Florence — to house the Medici book collection. These buildings are considered a turning point in architectural history.

But Michelangelo's crowning glory in this field came when he was made chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica in 1546.

Was Michelangelo Gay?

In 1532, Michelangelo developed an attachment to a young nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and wrote dozens of romantic sonnets dedicated to Cavalieri.

Despite this, scholars dispute whether this was a platonic or a homosexual relationship.

Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564 — just weeks before his 89th birthday — at his home in Macel de'Corvi, Rome, following a brief illness.

A nephew bore his body back to Florence, where he was revered by the public as the "father and master of all the arts." He was laid to rest at the Basilica di Santa Croce — his chosen place of burial.

Unlike many artists, Michelangelo achieved fame and wealth during his lifetime. He also had the peculiar distinction of living to see the publication of two biographies about his life, written by Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi.

Appreciation of Michelangelo's artistic mastery has endured for centuries, and his name has become synonymous with the finest humanist tradition of the Renaissance.

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Birth Year: 1475
• Birth date: March 6, 1475
• Birth City: Caprese (Republic of Florence)
• Birth Country: Italy
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo created the 'David' and 'Pieta' sculptures and the Sistine Chapel and 'Last Judgment' paintings.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Pisces
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Michelangelo was just 25 years old at the time when he created the 'Pieta' statue.
• For the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo fired all of his assistants and painted the 65-foot ceiling alone.
• Despite his immense talent, Michelangelo had a quick temper and contempt for authority.
• Death Year: 1564
• Death date: February 18, 1564
• Death City: Rome
• Death Country: Italy

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Michelangelo Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/michelangelo
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 4, 2020
• Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.
• I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
• I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow/my repose are these discomforts.
• With my wet-nurse's milk, I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.
• A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
• Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
• If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
• Critique by creating.
• The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
• With few words I will make thee understand my soul.
• Lord, make me see thy glory in every place.
• Genius is eternal patience.
• If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

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Michelangelo Buonarroti – A Detailed Michelangelo Biography

Michelangelo Buonarroti is considered by many to be among the most significant luminaries in the history of art. But, what is Michelangelo famous for and what did Michelangelo study? Michelangelo was one of those incredibly talented people that excelled in multiple disciplines, and was renowned for his sculptures, architecture, and paintings. To find out more about this fascinating Renaissance man, let’s take a deeper look at Michelangelo’s biography, as well as address some common questions on the topic, such as, “where did Michelangelo live?”, “was Michelangelo married?”, “how did Michelangelo die?”, and “how old was Michelangelo when he died?”.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Childhood and Early Training
• 1.2.1 Time in Florence
• 1.2.2 Time in Rome
• 1.2.3 The Making of David and Other Works
• 1.2.4 Rivalries
• 1.3.1 The Sistine Chapel
• 1.3.2 Julius II’s Tomb
• 1.4 Late Period
• 2 The Legacy of Michelangelo
• 3 Notable Artworks
• 4.1 How Did Michelangelo Die?
• 4.2 How Old Was Michelangelo When He Died?
• 4.3 What Did Michelangelo Study?
• 4.4 Was Michelangelo Married to Anyone?
• 4.5 Where Did Michelangelo Live?

Exploring Michelangelo’s Biography

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese, a little village close to Arezzo. He came from a middle-class background and his father was a banker. His mother had suffered for many years from an illness which unfortunately took her life when the young Michelangelo was only six years of age. His father had no choice but to leave him in the care of his nanny as he did not have the time to raise him. The nanny’s husband was a stonecutter by trade and it is believed that this is where the young artist’s passion for marble first began.

Childhood and Early Training

Even at the age of 13, it was apparent to Michelangelo’s father that the young boy had no desire to follow the family trade of banking and so he was sent to Domenico Ghirlandaio’s studio to serve as his apprentice. This studio would be the perfect place for the aspiring artist to pick up all the necessary techniques and tricks of the trade, with Ghirlandaio possessing a thorough knowledge of draftsmanship and fresco painting techniques. However, it is believed that Michelangelo found that his personal views on art often clashed with those of his mentor, and he preferred to study the works of the masters such as Donatello , Masaccio, and Giotto than follow Ghirlandaio’s methods. He had only been working at the studio for around a year when the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici, asked Ghirlandaio to let Michelangelo and Francesco Grancci (his two best students) join his Humanist academy.

In Renaissance Florence at this time, new ideas and philosophies were starting to emerge and artists were encouraged to study the humanities in order to supplement their artistic works with an understanding of ancient Greco-Roman art and philosophy.

The more progressive artists were establishing a Renaissance style that would promote humanist principles and recognize man’s essential role in creating the modern world, moving away from Gothic imagery and devotional works. While there, Michelangelo Buonarroti trained under Bertoldo di Giovanni, the bronze sculptor, who exposed him to the iconic classical statues in the Lorenzo Palace. Michelangelo, like Leonardo da Vinci , was not content with studying the principles of anatomy from classical sculptures. He undertook his own studies into human anatomy, dissecting corpses, and sketching from models until he got to the point where the human body no longer held any mysteries for him, and he felt like he quite literally knew the human body inside-out.

Yet, he differed from da Vinci in the fact that anatomy was just one riddle to be figured out of many for the other artist, whereas for Michelangelo, it was the single most important problem that he wanted to master above all others. Around this time, he received the necessary permission from the friars of Santo Spirito Church to examine corpses in the convent’s hospital, where he would acquire a thorough grasp of the anatomy of humans. After Lorenzo de’ Medici passed away in 1492, the 17-year-old Michelangelo found himself without a patron and was offered shelter in the monastery. Michelangelo produced a strikingly life-like wooden sculpture that hung over the main altar out of gratitude. It was reported as lost after the French conquest in the late 18th century, although it had actually been transported to another church and painted to conceal its identity.

The Republic of Florence was threatened with siege by the French in 1494. Concerned about his safety, Michelangelo relocated to Bologna, with a brief detour in Venice. In the city, he met Giovan Francesco Aldrovandi, a rich Bolognese senator who was successful in obtaining the commission for the outstanding statuettes for the marble tomb lid for the Arca of St. Dominic for Michelangelo. The original lid was produced by Niccolo dell’Arca in 1473, with Michelangelo carving the few surviving figures in 1496, including Saint Petronio, Saint Proculus, and an angel with candles. 

Michelangelo, who was still just 19 years old at the time, eclipsed the production of the elder sculptor with his unprecedented detail in the folds of the linen and fabric, and in the form of Petronio, to whom he added a palpable feeling of motion by depicting him in mid-step.

Time in Florence

Once the risk of a French invasion passed, Michelangelo temporarily returned back to Florence. He was working on two sculptures: one of St. John the Baptist and another depicting a cupid. Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio bought the sculpture after being deceived into thinking it was actually an antique statue. Despite his initial anger upon learning about the deceit, Cardinal Riario was rather impressed by the young sculptor’s talent and summoned him to Rome to start on a new project. Michelangelo sculpted a figure of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, for the commission, which was ultimately rejected by the Cardinal, who felt it was politically inappropriate to be affiliated with a nude pagan figure. Michelangelo, who had by that point gained notoriety for being temperamental, was enraged and told Condivi, his biographer, years later to instead record it as an order from his banker, Jacopo Galli, the man who ultimately bought the finished sculpture.

Time in Rome

After finishing the statue, Michelangelo stayed in Rome, and Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas ordered his Pietà for the chapel in Saint Peter’s Basilica for the King of France. “Pietà” was actually a generalized label assigned to devotional works aimed to encourage worshippers to participate in penitent prayer, but Michelangelo’s piece was its most renowned interpretation. Michelangelo’s sculpture was unique in that he created two characters from a single piece of marble. Additionally, his presentation of his figures, which highlighted the artist’s attention to emotion and naturalism, earned Michelangelo considerable praise and new followers. Despite the fact that his reputation as one of the most divinely talented individuals of the time was assured, Michelangelo failed to secure any big assignments for another two years.

Yet, he was not particularly concerned about a lack of employment or financial stability.

“No matter how affluent I may have been, I always behaved like a poor man”, he would declare to Condivi at the end of his life. Girolamo Savonarola, a Florentine puritanical monk, would become notorious in 1497 for his Bonfire of the Vanities, an occurrence in which he and his followers publicly destroyed paintings and books. Their behavior disrupted what had been a flourishing era of Renaissance culture. Michelangelo did not return to Florence until Savonarola was deposed a year later. In 1501, he received an order from the Guild of Wool to finish an incomplete project started four decades earlier by Agostino di Duccio.

The Making of David and Other Works

The 17-foot-tall naked figure of the scriptural hero David was completed in 1504. The piece was a testament to his unmatched talent in sculpting strikingly lifelike human beings out of cold marble. It has become the definitive symbol of the Renaissance concept of ideal humanity . Even though the artwork was initially planned for the cathedral’s buttress, the grandeur of the completed project persuaded Michelangelo’s peers to set it in a more significant location, to be decided by a committee of artists and influential figures. They opted to place the statue in front of the Palazzo Vecchio’s entryway as a representation of the Florentine Republic. Upon the iconic sculpture’s completion, he received numerous painting commissions.

Doni Tondo (1504) is the only painting of Michelangelo known to survive to the present day. Scholars believe the artwork reveals the artist’s infatuation with Da Vinci’s works. They claim that Michelangelo repeatedly denied being influenced by anybody, and his comments were typically accepted without question. However, Da Vinci’s return to Florence following almost two decades was exhilarating to the city’s younger artists, and later academics typically accepted that Michelangelo was among those artists influenced by his output. Competition between Michelangelo and his contemporaries was strong throughout the High Renaissance in Florence, with painters all competing for the same commissions.

Da Vinci was considered to be the most notable individual of the whole Florentine brotherhood of Renaissance masters and 23 years older than Michelangelo. Yet an unstated rivalry between the two artists was well recognized. Piero Soderini commissioned both painters to paint opposite walls of the Palace Vecchio’s Salone dei Cinquecento in 1503. It was a momentous time in art history when these two titans contended for the palm, and everyone in Florence observed their preparatory efforts with eager anticipation. Unfortunately, 

Soderini abandoned the project, and neither of the artworks were ever completed. Da Vinci traveled to Milan, while Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome.

Mature Period

When in Rome, Michelangelo began work on the Pope’s tomb, a gigantic mausoleum that was scheduled to be finished in five years. After visiting the famed Carrara quarries, he spent six months carefully searching for the ideal blocks of marble from which to create his figures. To his great disappointment, Julius summoned Michelangelo to Rome, where he heard that the structure designated to hold the tomb was to be demolished and the undertaking as a whole halted. Michelangelo was enraged and believed that there was some kind of plot to destroy him. He even suspected that Bramante, the new St. Peter’s Basilica’s architect, was plotting to poison him. Michelangelo then returned to Florence, enraged, and penned a letter to the Pope, voicing his indignation at his mistreatment in Rome.

The Sistine Chapel

The artist found himself in the midst of a complex diplomatic struggle between Rome and Florence. The head of the Florence city government convinced Michelangelo to return to Julius II’s employment and provided him with a recommendation letter in which he stated that his art was unparalleled across the whole of Italy, possibly even throughout the whole world. After creating a massive bronze figure of the pope for the recently acquired city of Bologna (which was abruptly demolished after papal invaders were defeated), 

Julius commissioned Michelangelo to finish a project begun by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and others.

The assignment was to create frescoes for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and it is believed that Bramante persuaded the Pope that Michelangelo was the ideal person for the task, despite the fact that Michelangelo was primarily recognized for his sculptures and hence almost certainly would not succeed in this massive endeavor. Michelangelo would spend the next four years working on the Sistine Chapel. He painted the ceiling while lying on his back on a scaffold structure made from wood, with only one assistant to mix the paint. What emerged, though, was a significant work of incredible talent depicting Old Testament narratives. 

The completed painting, which featured multiple naked individuals (an unusual sight at the time), would ultimately become a magnificent masterwork of artistic expression. After completing the Sistine ceiling, he went back to working on the initial project for Pope Julius’ tomb. After the passing of Pope Julius II in 1513, financing for his tomb came to a halt, and the artist was assigned by the new Pope Leo X to start working on the Basilica San Lorenzo’s façade, Florence’s largest church. Michelangelo worked on it for the next three years before abandoning it because of a shortage of funding. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici ruled Florence at the time, and the two men had a strong professional connection. Actually, under the Cardinal, Michelangelo enjoyed considerable creative freedom, which enabled him to venture deeper into the sphere of architectural design.

Julius II’s Tomb

Florence was proclaimed a republic following the conquest and pillage of Rome by Charles V’s forces in 1527. Nevertheless, the city was besieged in October 1529 before eventually falling in August 1530. The Medici family was reinstated to authority in the city by a new accord between Charles V and Pope Clement VII. After building defense structures for the fortification of Florence, Michelangelo was re-hired by Pope Clement, who offered him a new contract to resume work on Pope Julius II’s tomb. Michelangelo turned to fresco painting once more in Rome, this time for Pope Paul III. In 1534, he returned to the location of one of his greatest accomplishments, painting a huge and vibrant redemption tale for the Sistine Chapel’s altar wall. 

The Last Judgment, with its concept of Jesus’ “second coming,” was part of Roman Catholic teaching’s great narrative, and it took him seven years to complete.

Late Period

Toward the end of his career, Michelangelo began to focus more on architectural designs, and his most recognized work is St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Julius II suggested removing the existing Basilica and replacing it with the “greatest structure in Christendom”.  While Donato Bramante’s design was selected in 1505, and foundations were constructed the year after that, minimal progress had been made since. Michelangelo was in his 70s when he hesitantly took over the project from his rival (Bramante) in 1546, claiming, “I do this solely for the love of God and in reverence of the Apostle”. He continued working on the Basilica as Chief Architect for the remainder of his existence.

His most significant contribution to the design was his work on the dome at the Basilica’s eastern end. Except for the initial plans of Bramante, who had also envisioned an edifice to rival even Brunelleschi’s iconic dome in Florence, he disregarded all preceding architects’ ideas on the project. While the dome was not completed until after his passing, the foundation on which the dome was to be put was constructed, ensuring that the final draft of the dome remained loyal to Michelangelo’s grandiose vision.

The dome, which is still the biggest cathedral in the world, is both a Roman landmark and a tribute to Michelangelo’s eternal bond with the city.

Michelangelo’s final paintings, completed between 1542 and 1550, were a series of frescoes for the Vatican’s private Pauline Chapel. One of these works, The Crucifixion of St. Peter (1550), includes a horseman with a turban, and conservators and scholars think that this was actually a self-portrait. He also kept sculpting but did so privately for his own enjoyment. He finished a number of Pietàs, including the Deposition (1547), (which he actually tried to destroy) and his final work, the Rondanini Pietà (1564), on which he worked until his eventual death.

In his late years, the artist appears to have withdrawn more and more into himself. The poetry he composed indicates that he was tormented by uncertainties as to whether his artwork had been as sinful as others had accused it of being, while his letters made it obvious that the higher he gained in favor in the world, the more unpleasant and caustic he became. His infamous temper not only left others in awe but also in fear. His intensely private and reserved demeanor, including an instance where, while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he flung wooden boards at a passing Pope who he had confused for a spy, indicates he battled from bouts of paranoia.

The Legacy of Michelangelo

What is Michelangelo famous for? Michelangelo was regarded as the absolute master of sculpting when it came to the human form, which he accomplished with so much technical flair that his marble almost appeared to transform into life. Scholars have noted his influence on the works of other masters such as Peter Paul Rubens , Raphael, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, as well as Auguste Rodin, considered to be the last great sculptor to follow Michelangelo’s realist manner. Michelangelo has always been regarded as among a very small group of creative minds that were able to express the deepest and most tragic of human emotions to a degree of universal scope, along with other luminaries such as Beethoven and Shakespeare. And although the works of artists in this group were highly revered, they were seldom replicated and their subsequent influence was rather limited.

This was not because the artwork was regarded as too difficult to try and emulate – in fact, Raphael was regarded in the same light as Michelangelo as far as abilities are concerned, yet he was emulated much more by subsequent artists.

It appears that it was his particular style (that aspired to a “cosmic grandeur”), which artists found creatively inhibiting, and therefore did not try to mimic, except for a few artists such as Daniele de Volterra, who fully embraced his style. Rather, there were specific elements of his work that were embraced by certain movements. He was considered to be a master of anatomical drawing in the 17th century, for example, yet they found other aspects of his art lacking. Yet, while his influence may not always be so apparent or obvious, there is no doubt that his work had a very significant impact on the world of art.

Notable Artworks

Many consider Michelangelo’s ability to carve a figure (sometimes multiple figures) out of a single block of marble to be unmatched by any other sculptor. Yet, in addition to being so well-renowned as a sculptor, his artistic abilities knew no bounds, and he also created one of the most iconic frescoes in the history of art – the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel . That’s not even mentioning his world-famous architecture! Here are a few of his most notable artworks.

As we have discovered through our exploration of Michelangelo’s biography, he was an extremely talented yet temperamental individual who was determined to unravel all the secrets of human anatomy so that he could accurately depict our form in his famous sculptures. His talent was also the source of much paranoia in his life, often believing that someone was out to destroy him and his career. Despite his increasingly reclusive nature over the years, he was often called upon to produce works – many of which that have become some of the most iconic pieces in the history of art.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did michelangelo die.

It is believed that Michelangelo Buonarroti passed away due to a combination of issues with his kidneys and a simultaneous fever. Yet, despite his deteriorating condition, he worked right up to his death. He was even preparing sketches for new projects just before he passed away.

How Old Was Michelangelo When He Died?

The renowned sculptor and artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti, was 88 years of age when he eventually passed away. He died on the 18th of February 1564, following a prolonged illness that affected his kidneys and a serious fever. He was an active artist even in the final years of his life.

What Did Michelangelo Study?

From a young age, Michelangelo apprenticed under a series of various artists, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, whom he first worked under when he was 13 years of age. He also took it upon himself to learn about human anatomy by dissecting corpses. He also studied humanities for a while at the De Medici Academy in Florence.

Was Michelangelo Married to Anyone?

No, Michelangelo Buonarroti is not known to have married anyone throughout his life, and it is not even known if he ever had any romantic relationships. There were many rumors that he was actually gay, much of which could be backed up by his own writings, which were apparently very homo-erotic in nature. Yet, his main love was his art, and this is where all of his attention and devotion went to. However, we do know that he enjoyed the company of close friends, several of whom he was particularly fond of and confided in.

Where Did Michelangelo Live?

Michelangelo Buonarroti first grew up in Caprese in Florence, near Tuscany. Many of his famous works were created while living in Florence, such as David . He also spent a considerable amount of time in Rome, living and working on various projects such as the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo would continue to move depending on where he was commissioned to go, or sometimes based on political events where he no longer felt safe to stay where he was. He spent a fair amount of time in Venice, working on the Virgin Mary and Child sculpture. Several years were also spent in Bologna working on St. Dominic’s tomb, and he also spent time selecting marble for his sculptures in places such as Carrara.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

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Michelangelo

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 6, 2019 | Original: October 18, 2010

Michelangelo was a sculptor, painter and architect widely considered to be one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance—and arguably of all time. His work demonstrated a blend of psychological insight, physical realism and intensity never before seen. His contemporaries recognized his extraordinary talent, and Michelangelo received commissions from some of the most wealthy and powerful men of his day, including popes and others affiliated with the Catholic Church. His resulting work, most notably his Pietà and David sculptures and his Sistine Chapel paintings, has been carefully tended and preserved, ensuring that future generations would be able to view and appreciate Michelangelo’s genius.

Early Life and Training

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy. His father worked for the Florentine government, and shortly after his birth his family returned to Florence, the city Michelangelo would always consider his true home.

Did you know? Michelangelo received the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a consolation prize of sorts when Pope Julius II temporarily scaled back plans for a massive sculpted memorial to himself that Michelangelo was to complete.

Florence during the  Italian Renaissance  period was a vibrant arts center, an opportune locale for Michelangelo’s innate talents to develop and flourish. His mother died when he was 6, and initially his father initially did not approve of his son’s interest in art as a career. 

At 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, particularly known for his murals. A year later, his talent drew the attention of Florence’s leading citizen and art patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici , who enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of being surrounded by the city’s most literate, poetic and talented men. He extended an invitation to Michelangelo to reside in a room of his palatial home.

Michelangelo learned from and was inspired by the scholars and writers in Lorenzo’s intellectual circle, and his later work would forever be informed by what he learned about philosophy and politics in those years. While staying in the Medici home, he also refined his technique under the tutelage of Bertoldo di Giovanni, keeper of Lorenzo’s collection of ancient Roman sculptures and a noted sculptor himself. Although Michelangelo expressed his genius in many media, he would always consider himself a sculptor first.

Sculptures: The Pieta and David

Michelangelo was working in Rome by 1498 when he received a career-making commission from the visiting French cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, envoy of King Charles VIII to the pope. The cardinal wanted to create a substantial statue depicting a draped Virgin Mary with her dead son resting in her arms—a Pieta—to grace his own future tomb. Michelangelo’s delicate 69-inch-tall masterpiece featuring two intricate figures carved from one block of marble continues to draw legions of visitors to St. Peter’s Basilica more than 500 years after its completion.

Michelangelo returned to Florence and in 1501 was contracted to create, again from marble, a huge male figure to enhance the city’s famous Duomo, officially the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. He chose to depict the young David from the Old Testament of the Bible as heroic, energetic, powerful and spiritual and literally larger than life at 17 feet tall. The sculpture, considered by scholars to be nearly technically perfect, remains in Florence at the Galleria dell’Accademia , where it is a world-renowned symbol of the city and its artistic heritage.

Paintings: Sistine Chapel

In 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt a grand tomb with 40 life-size statues, and the artist began work. But the pope’s priorities shifted away from the project as he became embroiled in military disputes and his funds became scarce, and a displeased Michelangelo left Rome (although he continued to work on the tomb, off and on, for decades).

However, in 1508, Julius called Michelangelo back to Rome for a less expensive, but still ambitious painting project: to depict the 12 apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel , a most sacred part of the Vatican where new popes are elected and inaugurated.

Instead, over the course of the four-year project, Michelangelo painted 12 figures—seven prophets and five sibyls (female prophets of myth)—around the border of the ceiling and filled the central space with scenes from Genesis. 

Critics suggest that the way Michelangelo depicts the prophet Ezekiel—as strong yet stressed, determined yet unsure—is symbolic of Michelangelo’s sensitivity to the intrinsic complexity of the human condition. The most famous Sistine Chapel ceiling painting is the emotion-infused The Creation of Adam, in which God and Adam outstretch their hands to one another.

Architecture & Poems

The quintessential  Renaissance  man, Michelangelo continued to sculpt and paint until his death, although he increasingly worked on architectural projects as he aged: His work from 1520 to 1527 on the interior of the Medici Chapel in Florence included wall designs, windows and cornices that were unusual in their design and introduced startling variations on classical forms. 

Michelangelo also designed the iconic dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (although its completion came after his death). Among his other masterpieces are Moses (sculpture, completed 1515); The Last Judgment (painting, completed 1534); and Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk (sculptures, all completed by 1533).

Later Years

From the 1530s on, Michelangelo wrote poems; about 300 survive. Many incorporate the philosophy of Neo-Platonism—that a human soul, powered by love and ecstasy, can reunite with an almighty God—ideas that had been the subject of intense discussion while he was an adolescent living in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household.

After he left Florence permanently in 1534 for Rome, Michelangelo also wrote many lyrical letters to his family members who remained there. The theme of many was his strong attachment to various young men, especially aristocrat Tommaso Cavalieri. Scholars debate whether this was more an expression of homosexuality or a bittersweet longing by the unmarried, childless, aging Michelangelo for a father-son relationship.

Michelangelo died at age 88 after a short illness in 1564, surviving far past the usual life expectancy of the era. A pieta he had begun sculpting in the late 1540s, intended for his own tomb, remained unfinished but is on display at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo  in Florence—not very far from where Michelangelo is buried, at the Basilica di Santa Croce .

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Michelangelo

Italian Painter, Sculptor, Poet, and Architect

Summary of Michelangelo

It is universally accepted that Michelangelo is one of the greatest artists in the history of art. His phenomenal virtuosity as a sculptor, and also as a painter and architect, is married to a reputation for being hot-tempered and volatile. He was central to the revival in classical Greek and Roman art , but his contribution to Renaissance art and culture went far beyond the mere imitation of antiquity. Indeed, he conjured figures, both carved and painted, that were infused with such psychological intensity and emotional realism they set a new standard of excellence. Michelangelo's most seminal pieces: the massive painting of the biblical narratives on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the 17-foot-tall and anatomically flawless David, and the heartbreakingly genuine Pietà, are considered some of the greatest achievements in human history. Tourists flock to Rome and Florence to stand before them.

Accomplishments

• Michelangelo's early studies of classical sculpture were coupled with research into human cadavers. Having been granted access to a local hospital, he gained an almost surgical understanding of human anatomy. The resultant musculature of his figures is so naturalistic and precise they have been expected to spring to life at any moment.
• Michelangelo's dexterity with carving an entire sculpture from a single block of marble remains unmatched. He once said, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." He was known as the sculptor who could summon the living from stone.
• The fact that he considered himself first and foremost a sculptor, didn't stop Michelangelo from producing what is perhaps the most famous fresco in the history of world art. Featuring scenes from the Old Testament, his sublime achievement, which adorns the ceiling of the Vatican's holy Sistine Chapel, attracts millions of visitors to Rome each year. The task of painting the ceiling is at the heart of Michelangelo's legend. It is the tale of a disgruntled artist working for four years, in uncomfortable and cramped conditions atop a scaffold structure, on a commission that he never wanted.
• Michelangelo is one of the greatest artists in history and was the first to have had his biography published while still working. The great Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari, confirmed Michelangelo’s genius in his legendary book, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550).
• The artist's feisty and tempestuous personality is legendary. He often abandoned projects midway through or expressed his defiance through controversial means such as painting his own face on figures, or by putting in the faces of his enemies (in mocking fashion). One infamous attack was aimed at a high-ranking Vatican priest, Biagio de Cesena, who had complained about the level nudity in Michelangelo's Last Judgment fresco. In an act of revenge, the artist painted Minos (judge of the dead in Greek mythology) with Cesena's face, giving him donkeys ears, and with his testicles being bitten by a serpent.

The Life of Michelangelo

"The sculptor's hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone," Michelangelo famously said. Carved from a single block of marble, each figure he sculpted came alive with physical and psychological power, making him the most famous sculptor in history.

Important Art by Michelangelo

Bacchus , Michelangelo's first surviving large statue, depicts the Roman god of wine precariously balancing on a rock in a state of intoxication. He wears a wreath of ivy and holds a goblet in one hand, raised up toward his lips. In the other hand, he holds a lion skin, which is a symbol of death as derived from the myth of Hercules. From behind his left leg peeks a satyr, significant to the cult of Bacchus as often representing a drunken, lusty, woodland deity. The art historian Creighton E. Gilbert writes, "The Bacchus relies on ancient Roman nude figures as a point of departure, but it is much more mobile and more complex in outline. The conscious instability evokes the god of wine and Dionysian [relating to the sensuous and the orgiastic] revels with extraordinary virtuosity. Made for a garden, it is also unique among Michelangelo's works in calling for observation from all sides rather than primarily from the front." The work caused considerable controversy when it was unveiled. It was originally commissioned by Cardinal Riario and was inspired by a description of a lost bronze sculpture by the ancient sculptor Praxiteles. But when Riario saw the finished piece he found it inappropriate and rejected it. Michelangelo duly sold it to his banker, Jacopo Galli. Despite its checkered past, the piece is early evidence of Michelangelo's genius. His excellent knowledge of anatomy is seen in the androgynous figure's body which biographer Giorgio Vasari described as having the "the slenderness of a young man and the fleshy roundness of a woman." A high center of gravity lends the figure a sense of captured movement, which Michelangelo would later perfect for David . Although intended to mimic classical Greek sculpture Michelangelo remained true to what it means to be drunk; the unseemly swaying body was unlike any depiction of a god previously. Art historian Claire McCoy said of the sculpture, "Bacchus marked a moment when originality and imitation of the antique came together."

Marble - National Museum of Bargello, Florence

This was the first of a number of Pietàs Michelangelo worked on during his lifetime. It depicts the body of Jesus in the lap of his mother after the Crucifixion. This particular scene is one of the seven sorrows of Mary used in Catholic devotional prayers and depicts a key moment in her life foretold by the prophet, Simeon. Cardinal Jean de Bilhères commissioned the work, stating that he wanted to acquire the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better. The 24-year-old Michelangelo answered his call, carving the work in two years out of a single block of marble. Although the work continued a long tradition of devotional images, stretching back to 14 th century Germany, the depiction was unique to Italian Renaissance art of the time. Many artists were translating traditional religious narratives in a more humanist vein, blurring the boundaries between the divine and man by humanizing biblical figures and by taking liberties with expression. Mary was a popular subject, portrayed in myriad ways, and in this piece Michelangelo presented her, not as a mother in her fifties, but as a figure of youthful beauty. As Michelangelo related to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste?" Not only was Pietà the first interpretation of the scene in marble, but Michelangelo also moved away from the depiction of the Virgin's suffering which was usually portrayed in Pietàs of the time, presenting her instead with a profound sense of maternal tenderness. Christ too, shows little sign of his recent crucifixion with only slightly discernible nail marks in his hands and through the small wound in his side. Rather than a dead man, he looks as if he is sleeping in the arms of his mother while she waits for her son to awaken. A pyramidal structure, signature to the time, was also adopted here: Mary's head at the top and then the gradual widening through her layered garments towards the base. The folds of the draped clothing give credence to Michelangelo's mastery of marble, as they retain a sense of flowing movement, and an incredible standard of polished sheen, that is so difficult to achieve in stone. This is the only sculpture Michelangelo ever signed. In a fiery fit of reaction to rumors circulating that the piece was made by one of his competitors, Cristoforo Solari, he carved his name across Mary's sash right between her breasts. He also split his name in two as Michael Angelus, which can be seen as a reference to the Archangel Michael - an egotistical move and one he would later regret. He swore to never again sign another piece and stayed true to his word. This Pietà became famous immediately following its completion and was pivotal in contributing to Michelangelo's fame. The sculpture was loaned to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. It was transported there by sea in a 2.5 ton buoyant and waterproof plexiglass case that contained a radio transmitter (so, should the ship sink, the sculpture could still be located and recovered). Despite an attack in 1972 (by a mentally unstable Hungarian-Austrian geologist, who cried out "I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead!") which damaged Mary's arm and face, it was restored, placed behind a bulletproof crystal wall, and continues to inspire awe in visitors to this day.

Marble - Vatican City

The sculptor Donatello had revived the classical nude by sculpting a bronze version of David (1440-60). It would become a masterpiece of the Early Renaissance. But Michelangelo's towering marble figure overtook it as the most accomplished and iconic version of the story in the history of Western art. Michelangelo's majestic 17-foot-tall statue depicts the prophet David, with the slingshot he will use to slay Goliath, slung over his left shoulder. Michelangelo took the unusual decision to depict David before battle (in contrast, Donatello's triumphant David stands with his foot on top of his enemy's severed head). In fact, David's great foe (Goliath) is not referenced in the work at all. Michelangelo was commissioned to produce the sculpture for the Opera del Duomo at the Cathedral of Florence. It was to be one of a series of statues to be placed in the niches of the cathedral's tribunes (some 80 meters above ground). He was asked by the consuls of the Board to complete a project, abandoned previously by Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino, both of whom had rejected the enormous block of marble due to the presence of too many " taroli " (imperfections). The block of marble had stood idle in the Opera's courtyard for some 25 years. In his oft-cited biography, Ascanio Convidi wrote that it was known (from archive documents) that Michelangelo worked on David "in utmost secrecy, hiding his masterpiece in the making up until January 1504". He added that "since he worked in the open courtyard, when it rained he worked soaked" but, that rather than let the rain disturb him, it inspired Michelangelo's working method in which he created a wax model (of David ) and submerged it in water. As he worked, he would lower the level of the water, revealing the wax figure bit-by-bit. As Convidi explains, "using different chisels [he then] sculpted what he could see emerging". So engrossed was he in the project, Michelangelo is said to have "slept sporadically, and when he did he slept with his clothes and even in his boots still on, and rarely ate". The finished work is an exquisite example of Michelangelo's mastery of anatomy. This is most evident in David's musculature; his strength emphasized through the classical contrapposto (asymmetrical) stance, with weight shifting onto his right leg. The top half of the body was made slightly larger than the legs so that viewers glancing up at David from below, or from afar, would experience a more realistic perspective. Such was the figure's authenticity, Vasari proclaimed: "without any doubt this figure has put in the shade every other statue, ancient or modern, Greek or Roman." While the statue was widely revered, it was also reviled for its sexual explicitness. For instance, during the late nineteenth century, a plaster cast of David was exhibited at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. So as not to offend the tastes of noble women, Queen Victoria ordered that a "detachable" plaster fig leaf be added to the figure to protect David's modesty. On another occasion, a replica of David was offered to the municipality of Jerusalem to mark the 3,000th anniversary of King David's conquest of the city. Religious factions in Jerusalem urged that the gift be declined because the naked figure was considered pornographic. A fully clothed replica of David by Andrea del Verrocchio, a Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo, was accepted in its place.

Marble - Gallery of the Academy of Florence

Doni Tondo (Holy Family)

Holy Family , the only finished panel painting by the artist to survive, was commissioned by Agnolo Doni (which gives it its name) to commemorate his marriage to Maddalena Strozzi, daughter of a powerful Tuscan family. The inclusion of the infant St. John further suggests it was intended for mark the news of Maddalena's pregnancy (the couple's first child, Maria, was born in 1507). Moreover, botanists have identified the plant on the left as a clitoria plant that, like Mary's braid, was a symbol of fertility. The painting portrays Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and an infant John the Baptist. The intimate tenderness of the figures governed by the father's loving gaze emphasizes the love of family and divine love, representing the cores of Christian faith. In contrast, the five nude males in the background symbolize pagans awaiting redemption. The round (tondo) form was customary for private commissions and Michelangelo designed the intricate gold carved wooden frame. The work is believed to be entirely by his hand. We find many of the artist's influences in this painting, including Signorelli's Madonna . It is also said to have been influenced by Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with St. Anne , a full scale drawing that Michelangelo saw while working on his David in 1501. The nude figures in the background are thought to have been influenced by the ancient statue of Laocoön and His Sons attributed to the Greek sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, which was excavated in Rome in 1506 and publicly displayed in the Vatican. Yet these influences aside, the piece is an example of the artist's individualism, which was even considered avant-garde in its time. The painting represented a significant shift from the serene, static rendition of figures depicted in classical Roman and Greek sculpture. Michelangelo's twisting figures signify great energy and movement, and the vibrant colors add to the majesty of the work, which were later used in his frescos in the Sistine Chapel. The soft modeling of the figures in the background with the focused details in the foreground gives this small painting its great depth. This painting might be said to anticipate the Mannerist style which, in contrast to the High Renaissance commitment to proportion and idealized beauty, showed a preference for exaggeration and affectation over naturalism.

Oil and tempera - The Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The Creation of Adam

This legendary image, part of the vast masterpiece that adorns the ceiling of the Vatican City's Sistine Chapel, shows Adam as a muscular classical nude, reclining on the left, as he extends his hand toward God who fills the right half of the painting. God rushes toward him, his haste conveyed by his white flaring robe and the energetic movements of his body. God is surrounded by angels and cherubim, all encased within a red cloud, while a feminine figure, thought to be Eve (first woman) or Sophia (symbol of wisdom), peers out with curious interest from underneath God's arm. Behind Adam, the green ledge upon which he lies, and the mountainous background create a strong diagonal, emphasizing the division between mortal man and heavenly God. As a result the viewer's eye is drawn to the hands of God and Adam, outlined in the central space, almost touching. Some have noted that the shape of the red cloud resembles the shape of the human brain, as if the artist meant to imply God's intent to infuse Adam with not merely animate life, but also the important gift of consciousness. This was an innovative depiction of the creation of Adam. Contrary to traditional artworks, God is not shown as aloof and regal, separate and above mortal man. For Michelangelo, it was important to depict the all-powerful giver of life as one distinctly intimate with man, whom he created in his own image. This reflected the humanist ideals of man's essential place in the world and the connection to the divine. The bodies have a sculptural quality that replicate the mastery of the artist's command of human anatomy. While acknowledging that Michelangelo painted the ceiling alone, laying on scaffolding on his back, and looking upward, the famous art historian E H Gombrich wrote that this feat of physical endurance was "nothing compared to the intellectual and artistic achievement. The wealth of ever-new [Renaissance] inventions, the unfailing mastery of execution in every detail, and, above all, the grandeur of the vision which Michelangelo revealed to those who came after him, have given mankind a quite new idea of the power of genius." The idea that Michelangelo was less than happy about the commission was confirmed through correspondences in 1509 to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia. He wrote, "I've already grown a goiter from this torture, [my] stomach's squashed under my chin, [my] face makes a fine floor for droppings, [my] skin hangs loose below me, [and my] spine's all knotted from folding myself over". He concluded, "I am not in the right place - I am not a painter."

Fresco - Vatican City

Michelangelo's monumental (eight-feet tall) statue depicts Moses seated regally as he shields the tablets on which the Ten Commandments are written. His expression is stern, reflecting his power and his displeasure at seeing the Israelites worshipping the golden calf (a pagan idol) on his return from Mount Sinai. Not only has Michelangelo rendered the great prophet with a complex emotional expression, strong muscular definition, and a flowing beard, his work on the deep folds of the fabric of Moses's clothes carries exquisite detail that completes its authenticity. Indeed, Michelangelo has imbued his Moses with a sense of energy that is remarkable for a stone figure, let alone one which who is seated. Michelangelo's reputation had reached new heights with his sculpture, David . This led to an invitation from Pope Julius II to come to Rome to work on a planned tomb. The artist initially proposed an (over) ambitious project featuring some 40 figures (the central piece being Moses). Much to the infuriation of the artist, however, Pope Julius II suspended work on the tomb so that he could paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (with the scaled-down tomb only completed in 1545 (32 years after Julius's death) and installed in San Pietro in Vincoli rather than the St. Peter's Basilica as originally planned). The sculpture has been the subject of much analysis, especially with regard to the horns protruding from Moses's head. In medieval art, Moses was often depicted with horns, and this was generally considered a symbol of the "glorification" of his power. This reading stems in fact from a mistranslation of the Hebrew word, karan which means "shining" or "emitting rays". Karan was translated into the Latin Bible as "horn", with the relevant passage reading thus: "And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord." Legend tells that Michelangelo felt that Moses was his most life-like work and upon its completion he struck its knee, commanding "Now, speak!" The artist's pride in his achievement was fully warranted according to Vasari, who said of Moses that it was "a statue unrivaled by any contemporary or ancient achievement," adding that Moses's "long, lustrous beard, the strands of which are so silky and feathery that it appears as if the metal chisel has turned into a brush. The lovely face, like that of a prophet or a strong prince, seemed to require a veil to cover it, so magnificent and radiant is it, and so beautifully has the artist depicted in marble the purity with which he had bestowed that holy visage."

Marble - San Pietro Vincoli, Rome

The Last Judgment

This fresco covers the entire altar wall of the Sistine Chapel and is one of the last pieces to be made in the seminal building, and the first commissioned by Pope Paul III. Painted when Michelangelo was 62, we see the Second Coming of Christ as he delivers the message of salvation (through the Last Judgment). The monumental work took five years to complete and consists of over 300 individual figures. The scene is one of harried action around the central presence of Christ, his hands raised to reveal the wounds of his Crucifixion, as he looks down upon the souls of humans as they rise to their fates. With this arresting tableau, Paul III was seeking to counter the Protestant Reformation by reaffirming the orthodoxies and doctrines of the Catholic Church, and the visual arts were to play a vital role in his plans. To Christ's left, the Virgin Mary glances toward the saved. To either side of Christ are John the Baptist and St Peter holding the keys to heaven. On the right, Charon the ferryman is shown bringing the damned to the gates of Hell. Minos (ruler of Crete in Greek mythology), assuming the role Dante gave him in his Inferno , admits them to Hell. Another noteworthy group are the seven angels blowing trumpets illustrating the Book of Revelation's end of the world. Michelangelo's self-portrait appears twice in the painting, meanwhile, first in the flayed skin which the figure of St. Bartholomew is carrying in his left-hand, and second in the figure in the lower left-hand corner, who is looking at the saved souls rising up from their graves. In typical Michelangelo fashion, the artist courted controversy, chiefly by rendering nude figures with pronounced muscular anatomies. One of the myths surrounding the fresco relates to the priest, and high-ranking Vatican official, Biagio de Cesena, whom Michelangelo portrayed as Minos following his public criticism of the (unfinished) painting. Cesena had complained that the painting contained so much nudity it was "more fitting for a tavern that the Sistine Chapel". Vasari reports that "Michelangelo, angry at the remark, is said to have painted Cesena's face onto Minos, judge of the underworld, with donkey's ears. Cesena complained to the Pope at being so ridiculed, but the Pope is said to have jokingly remarked that his jurisdiction did not extend to Hell." Following a recent cleaning of the fresco, moreover, it has been revealed that Minos's testicles are being attacked by a serpent. Interestingly, theologian John O'Malley, notes that in 1563 the Council of Trent pronounced that "iconoclasm is wrong" and that "images of sacred subjects […] should not contain any - sensual appeal or - seductive charm." Following the Council’s judgement, it was decreed that "The pictures in the Apostolic Chapel are to be covered..." On January 21, 1564, less than a month before Michelangelo's death, the decree was formally applied to The Last Judgment . So, next year, Michelangelo's friend, Daniele da Volterra, was commissioned to add clothing to the nude figures (earning Volterra the nickname "breeches-maker"). (O'Malley observes that "there is no instance of any other painting in Rome being defaced as a result of [the decree].") The Last Judgment was only restored to its original glory in the 1990s.

The Deposition

This piece is not only sculpturally complex, but it carries layers of meaning and has sparked multiple interpretations. In it, we see Christ the moment after the Deposition, or being taken down from the cross of his crucifixion. He is falling into the arms of his mother, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene, whose presence in a work of such importance was highly unusual. Behind the trio is a hooded figure, which is said to be either Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus, both of whom were in attendance at the entombment of Christ (which followed the Deposition). Joseph would give up his tomb for Christ and Nicodemus would speak with Christ about the possibility of obtaining eternal life. Because Christ is seen falling into the arms of his mother, this piece is also often referred to as a Pietà. The three themes alluded to in this one piece - The Deposition, The Pietà, and The Entombment - are further emphasized by the way Michelangelo carved out his narrative. Not only is it intense in its realism, The Deposition was sculpted so that a viewer could walk around the piece and observe each of the three narratives from different visual perspectives and to possibly reflect upon how the stories might be interrelated. The sculpture is also a perfect example of Michelangelo's temperament and perfectionism. The process of making it was arduous. Vasari relates that the artist complained about the quality of the marble. Some suggest he had a problem with the way Christ's left leg originally draped over Nicodemus, worrying that some might interpret it in a sexual way, causing him to remove it. It is also feasible that Michelangelo was so particular with the piece because he intended it for his own future tomb. In 1555, Michelangelo attempted to destroy the piece causing further speculation about its meaning. There is a suggestion that the attempted destruction of the piece was because Nicodemus, by reference to his conversation with Christ about the need to be born again to find everlasting life, is associated with Martin Luther's Reformation. Michelangelo was rumored to be a secret sympathizer, which was dangerous even for someone as influential as he. Perhaps a coincidence, but his Lutheran sympathies are given as one of the reasons why Pope Paul IV cancelled Michelangelo's pension in 1555. Vasari also suggests that the face of Nicodemus is a self-portrait, which may allude to the artist's crisis of faith. Michelangelo gave the unfinished piece to Francesco Bandini, a wealthy merchant, who commissioned Tiberio Calcagni, a friend of Michelangelo's, to finish the work and repair the damage (but stopping short of replacing Christ's left leg).

Marble - Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

Pietà Rondanini

Pietà Rondanini is the last sculpture Michelangelo worked on in the weeks leading up to his death, finalizing a story that weaved through his many Pietàs and now reflective of the artist's reckoning with his own mortality. The depiction of Christ has changed from his earlier St. Peter's Pietà in which Christ appeared asleep, through to his Deposition, where Christ's body was more lifeless, to now, where Christ is shown in the pain and suffering of death. His mother Mary is standing in this piece, an unusual rendition, as she struggles to hold up the body of her son while engulfed with grief. What's interesting about this work is that Michelangelo abandoned his usual detail at carving the body, even though he worked on it intermittently for some 12 years. It was a departure that, coming so late in his prolific career, signified the enduring genius of an artist whose confidence would allow him to try new things even when his fame would have allowed him to rest upon his laurels. The detached arm, the subtle sketched features of the face, and the way the figures almost blend into one other provide a more abstracted quality than was his norm, and prefigures a minimalist quality that was yet to come in sculpture. The renowned sculptor Henry Moore later said of this piece, "This is the kind of quality you get in the work of old men who are really great. They can simplify, they can leave out... This Pietà is by someone who knows the whole thing so well he can use a chisel like someone else would use a pen." This sculpture's importance was ignored for centuries, and it almost entirely disappeared from public discourse until it was found in the possession of Marchese Rondanini in 1807. It has since excited many modern artists. The Italian artist Massimo Lippi is quoted as saying that modern and contemporary art began with this Pietà , and the South African painter, Marlene Dumas, based her Homage to Michelangelo (2012) on this work.

Marble - Museo d'arte antica, Sforza Castle, Milan

Biography of Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was born to Leonardo di Buonarrota and Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena, a middle-class family of bankers, living in the small village of Caprese (now known in his honor as Michelangelo Caprese), near Arezzo, Tuscany. His mother's unfortunate and prolonged illness, which led to her death while Michelangelo was just six years old, forced his father to place his son in the primary care of his nanny. The nanny was married to a stonecutter and legend tells it that this (forced) domestic situation would form the foundation for the artist's lifelong love affair with marble.

By the time he was 13 years old, it was clear to his father that Michelangelo had no aptitude for the family vocation. The young boy was sent to apprentice in the well-known Florentine studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio . The art historian E.H. Gombrich writes, "In his workshop the young Michelangelo could certainly learn all the technical tricks of the trade, a solid technique in painting frescoes, and thorough grounding in draftsmanship. But, as far as we know, Michelangelo did not enjoy his days in the painter's firm. His ideas about art were different. Instead of acquiring the facile manner of Ghirlandaio, he went out to study the work of the great masters of the past, Giotto , Masaccio , Donatello , and other Greek and Roman sculptors whose work he could see in the Medici collection".

After only a year in the studio, Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and renowned patron of the arts, asked Ghirlandaio to supply his two best students - Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci - to join the Medici's Humanist academy. It was a thriving time in Renaissance Florence when artists were encouraged to study the humanities, complementing their creative endeavors with knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman art and philosophy. Progressive artists were moving away from Gothic iconography and devotional work and evolving a Renaissance style that would foreground humanist ideals and celebrate man's primary role in shaping the modern world.

Michelangelo studied under the bronze sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, bringing him exposure to the great classical sculptures in the palace of Lorenzo. But as Gombrich says, "Like Leonardo, [Michelangelo] was not content with learning the laws of anatomy secondhand, as it were, from antique sculpture. He made his own research into human anatomy, dissected bodies and drew from models, till the human figure did not hold any secrets for him." However, unlike Leonardo, for whom human anatomy was just one of the many "riddles of nature", Michelangelo "strove with an incredible singleness of purpose to master this one problem, but to master it fully."

During this period, Michelangelo obtained permission from the friars at the Church of Santo Spirito to study cadavers in the convent's hospital where he would gain a deep understanding of human anatomy. Michelangelo's uncanny ability to render the muscular tone of the body was evidenced in two surviving sculptures from the period: Madonna of the Stairs (1491), and Battle of the Centaurs (1492). The 17-year-old Michelangelo was given refuge at the convent following the death of his patron, Lorenzo di Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent) in 1492. By way of a "thank-you", Michelangelo carved a highly realistic wooden sculpture which hung over the main altar. (After the French occupation in the late 18 th -century, the cross was recorded as lost but it had in fact been moved to another chapel where it was painted to disguise its origins. Once restored, it was on display at the museum of Casa Buonarroti, where it remained until 2000 before being returned to its original home at Santo Spirito.)

Early Training and Work

In 1494, as the Republic of Florence was under the threat of siege from the French. Michelangelo, fearing for his safety, moved, via a brief stop in Venice, to the relative safety of Bologna. In the city he was befriended by the wealthy Bolognese senator, Giovan Francesco Aldrovandi, who was able to secure the 19-year-old Michelangelo the commission to complete the remaining statuettes for the marble sarcophagus lid for the Arca of St. Dominic. The original lid, by Niccolò dell'Arca, was installed in 1473, with Michelangelo sculpting the few remaining figures, including Saint Proculus, Saint Petronio, and an angel with candelabra, in 1496. Still just 19 years old, Michelangelo overshadowed the work of the older sculptor through his fine detail in the folds of the cloth and drapery, and in the figure of Petronio to whom he brought a tangible sense of movement by representing him in mid-step.

Michelangelo returned briefly to Florence after the threat of the French invasion abated. He worked on two statues, one of St. John the Baptist , the other, a small cupid. The Cupid was sold to Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio, who had been duped into believing that it was an antique sculpture. Although angry on learning of the deception, Cardinal Riario was impressed by Michelangelo's skill and invited him to Rome to work on a new project. For this commission, Michelangelo created a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, which was, on its completion, rejected by the Cardinal who thought it politically imprudent to be associated with a naked pagan figure. Michelangelo, who had already garnered a reputation for being volatile, was left incensed and many years later instructed his biographer, Condivi, to deny the commission came from the Cardinal at all, and to record it rather as a commission from his banker, Jacopo Galli (who had purchased the finished work).

Michelangelo remained in Rome after completing the Bacchus , and in 1497 the French Ambassador, Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas commissioned his Pietà for the chapel of the King of France in St Peter 's Basilica. Probably its most famous interpretation, Pietà was in fact a generic title applied to devotional works designed to prompt worshippers to engage in repentant prayer. What was unusual (although not unheard of) about Michelangelo's sculpture was that he realized two figures from a single block of marble. Moreover, his treatment of his subjects, which foregrounded the artist's acuity with emotion and realism, garnered Michelangelo much praise and many new admirers. Indeed, his Pietà was to become one of his most famous early carvings; one which the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari , described as something "nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh."

Although his status as one of the period's most divinely gifted artists was now secure, Michelangelo didn't receive any major commissions for some two years. Financially, however, this shortage of work and/or money wasn't of primary concern to the artist. As he would say to Condivi towards the end of his life, "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man."

In 1497, the puritanical monk Florentine Girolamo Savonarola became famous for his Bonfire of the Vanities, an event in which he and his supporters publicly burned art and books. Their actions caused an interruption to what had been a thriving period of Renaissance culture. Michelangelo would have to wait until Savonarola's ousting a year later before returning to his beloved Florence.

In 1501, his most majestic achievement in sculpture was born through a commission from the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun by Agostino di Duccio some 40 years earlier. This project, completed in 1504, was a 17-foot-tall nude statue of the biblical hero David. The work - its importance to the history of sculpture, comparable, perhaps, to Leonardo's Mona Lisa and its place in the history oil painting - was a testament to the artist's unparalleled excellence at carving breathtakingly real human figures out of inanimate marble.

The art historian Creighton E. Gilbert said of the David , "It has continued to serve as the prime statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. Although the sculpture was originally intended for the buttress of the cathedral, the magnificence of the finished work convinced Michelangelo's contemporaries to install it in a more prominent place, to be determined by a commission formed of artists and prominent citizens. They decided that the David would be installed in front of the entrance of the Palazzo dei Priori (now called Palazzo Vecchio) as a symbol of the Florentine Republic".

Several painting commissions followed David's completion. Michelangelo's only known surviving painting is, Doni Tondo ( The Holy Family ) (1504). Gilbert writes that the painting betrays "the artist's fascination with the work of Leonardo". He adds that Michelangelo "regularly denied that anyone influenced him, and his statements have usually been accepted without demur. But Leonardo's return to Florence in 1500 after nearly 20 years was exciting to younger artists there, and later scholars generally agreed that Michelangelo was among those affected."

During this time of the High Renaissance in Florence, rivalry between Michelangelo and his peers was fierce, with artists competing for prime commissions (and the accolades that came with them).

Leonardo was, at 23 years Michelangelo's senior, the most celebrated figure of all within the Florentine fraternity of Renaissance masters. But an unspoken rivalry between the two men was well known. In 1503, Piero Soderini, the lifetime Gonfalonier of Justice (a senior civil servant position akin to the role of Mayor), commissioned both artists to paint opposing walls of the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. As Gombrich writes, "It was a dramatic moment in the history of art where these two giants competed for the palm, and all of Florence watched with excitement the progress of their preparations." Sadly, Soderini abandoned the commission and the paintings (Leonardo's The Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo's The Battle of Cascina ) were never finished. Leonardo returned to Milan, while Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II.

Mature Period

In Rome, Michelangelo made preparations for the Pope's tomb; a giant mausoleum that was to be completed within a five-year timeline. Having travelled to the famous quarries at Carrara, he spent some six months painstakingly searching out the perfect blocks of marble from which to conjure his figures. Much to his chagrin, Julius recalled Michelangelo to Rome where he learned that the building earmarked to house the tomb was to be pulled down and the project as a whole put on ice. Michelangelo was incensed and became convinced that there was a conspiracy to destroy him. Indeed, he believed that the architect of the new St. Peter's Basilica, Bramante, was hatching a plot to have him poisoned. In his anger, Michelangelo returned to Florence and wrote a letter to the Pope expressing disgust at his treatment in Rome.

Michelangelo found himself at the center of a tricky diplomatic standoff between Florence and Rome. As Gombrich writes, "The head of the city of Florence therefore persuaded Michelangelo to return to the services of Julius II and gave him a letter of recommendation in which he said that his art was unequalled throughout Italy, perhaps even throughout the world, and that if he met with kindness 'he would achieve things that which would amaze the whole world'."

Having produced a colossal bronze statue of the pope for the newly conquered city of Bologna (unceremoniously pulled down once papal occupiers had been repelled), Michelangelo was commissioned by Julius to complete a project already started by Botticelli , Ghirlandaio , and others. The commission was to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and legend has it that Bramante had convinced the Pope that Michelangelo was the best man for the job, in the knowledge that Michelangelo was better known for his sculptures and was therefore almost certain to fail in this enormous undertaking.

Michelangelo would work on the Sistine Chapel for nearly four years. It was a job of extraordinary endurance in which (according to popular mythology) the artist painted the ceiling laying on his back atop a wooden scaffold structure (a task made even more difficult given that the tempestuous artist had dismissed all of his assistants, save one who helped him mix paint). What resulted, however, was a monumental work of stunning virtuosity illustrating stories from the Old Testament including the Creation of the World and Noah and the Flood. The finished work, which featured several nude figures (a fairly uncommon feature of the time) would become a towering masterpiece of human creation.

A serious rival to Michelangelo was a 26-year-old "upstart" named Raphael. He had burst upon the scene and was chosen in 1508 to paint a fresco in Pope Julius II's private library, a commission vied for by both Michelangelo and Leonardo. When Leonardo's health began to fail him, Raphael assumed the role of Michelangelo's greatest rival. Because of Raphael's acuity in depicting anatomy, and his finesse for painting nudes, Michelangelo would accuse him of copying his own work. Although acknowledging a degree of debt to Michelangelo, Raphael resented such animosity toward him and responded by painting the artist with his sulking face in the guise of Heraclitus in his famous fresco The School of Athens (1509-11).

Once the Sistine ceiling was completed, Michelangelo returned to work on the earlier project for the tomb of Pope Julius. Between 1513-15 he carved Moses , in which many recognize a new level of detail and control in his work that can be traced back to the figures of the prophets he painted on the Sistine ceiling. He also carved two further figures, thought to be slaves or prisoners. These pieces were also intended for the Julius tomb project, but they remained in the artist's possession until old age when he gifted them to a family who had nursed him through an earlier bout of illness (they are now housed in the Louvre).

Following Pope Julius II's death in 1513, funds for his tomb were cut and Michelangelo was commissioned by the new Pope Leo X to work on the façade of the Basilica San Lorenzo, the largest church in Florence (and therefore dedicated to the legacy of the Medici clan rather than the papacy). Michelangelo spent the next three years working on it before the project was cancelled due to lack of funds. Florence was under the rule of Cardinal Giulio de' Medici (Pope Leo X's cousin) and the two men formed a close working relationship. Indeed, Michelangelo enjoyed great creative liberties under the Cardinal, and this allowed him to move further into the field of architectural design. A project for a parish church in San Lorenzo was never realized, but Michelangelo did work on a design for The Medici Chapel.

Michelangelo worked on the New Sacristy (complementing the Old Sacristy by Brunelleschi that sat on the opposite side of the church) between 1520 and 1534. In its own literature, the Medici Chapels describes how "Michelangelo worked on the sculptures of the sarcophagi, but the only ones actually completed were the statues of the Dukes Lorenzo and Giuliano, the allegories of Dawn and Dusk , Night and Day and the group of Madonna and Child placed above the sarcophagus of the two 'magnifici' and flanked by Saints Cosmas and Damian. The latter were executed by Montorsoli and Baccio di Montelupo, pupils of Michelangelo."

The figure of Night ranks for many as one of Michelangelo's finest works. In his entry, "The Life of Michelangelo", in The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari quotes an epigram by Giovanni Strozzi who said of the figure: "Night, whom you see sleeping in such sweet attitudes was carved in this stone by an Angel and although she sleeps, she has life: wake her, if you don't believe it, and she will speak to you."

The Laurentian Library ( Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ) was built into a cloister of the Basilica of San Lorenzo. The library contains manuscripts and early printed books donated by Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was built under the patronage of Pope Clement VII, who commissioned Michelangelo to design the architecture in 1524. Although often overlooked in surveys of his work, the stairwell ( ricetto ) features Michelangelo's original wall and floor decorations while the columns in the library's main chamber are concealed behind the walls (rather than in front as was typical of classical architectural design) allowing for the rows of desks to be placed in a rhythmic harmony with the windows. The library is considered an early example of the more decorative Mannerist style of High Renaissance art and architecture.

Following the capture and looting of Rome by the armies of Charles V in 1527, Florence, was declared a republic. However, the city came under siege in October 1529 before it finally fell in August 1530. In a new agreement between Pope Clement VII and Charles V, the Medici family was once more returned to power in the city. Having worked for the defense of the Florence (it is thought that Michelangelo had a profound love of the city rather that a belief in any religious/political cause) by designing fortifications, Michelangelo was re-employed by Pope Clement who gave him a new contract to re-commence work on the tomb of Pope Julius II.

In 1534, Michelangelo headed to Rome where he would live out the rest of his days. He sent many letters from Rome to family members (many relating to the marriage of a nephew and the preservation of the family name). His father and brother had recently passed, and Michelangelo reveals himself as someone becoming increasingly concerned about his own mortality.

At the age of 57, Michelangelo would establish the first of three close friendships. Tommaso dei Cavalieri was a 23-year-old Italian nobleman who is thought to have been the artist's young lover and a lifelong friend. However, some historians (Gilbert included) point out that Michelangelo's sexuality cannot be confirmed, and the fact that he had no heir, suggests that in Tommaso (the "light of our century, paragon of all the world" as the artist once described him) Michelangelo might have been seeking an adopted son. The belief that Michelangelo was homosexual is nevertheless reinforced by the knowledge that he penned over 300 poems and 75 sonnets, some so homoerotic in nature, that his grandnephew, upon publishing these as a collection in 1623, changed the gender pronouns to disguise their original context.

In Rome, Michelangelo turned to fresco panting once more, this time in the services of Pope Paul III. In 1534 he found himself again at the site of one of his greatest triumphs, painting a grand and dynamic salvation narrative for the altar wall in the Sistine Chapel. It would take him seven years to complete. The Last Judgment , with its theme of Jesus's "second coming", was part of the grand narrative of Roman Catholic teaching. Michelangelo's fresco represented an attempt on the part of the Pope to oppose the Protestant Reformation (in what was known as the Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation) which was sweeping Northern Europe and had challenged the authority of the Catholic church. Michelangelo still took subtle liberties with the traditional telling of the biblical story, such as the representation of a beardless Christ, and by omitting altogether his throne and the attendant wingless angels.

During this period, in which Michelangelo became an official Roman citizen in 1537, he found another close companion in the widow, Vittoria Colonna, the Marquise of Pescara. She too, was a poet. Indeed, the majority of Michelangelo's poetry is devoted to Colonna, and his adoration of her continued until her death in 1547. He also gifted her paintings and drawings, and one of the most beautiful to have survived is the black chalk drawing Pietà for Vittoria Colonna (1546). Colonna was the only woman to play a significant part in Michelangelo's life (his mother, we recall, died when he was just a small boy) and their relationship is generally believed to have been platonic. But in 1540, Michelangelo met Cecchino dei Bracci, the 12-year-old son of a wealthy Florentine banker, at the Court of Pope Paul III. The epitaphs Michelangelo wrote following Cecchino's death four years later strongly suggest a sexual relationship. In one, the artist wrote, "Do yet attest for him how gracious I was in bed. When he embraced, and in what the soul doth live."

Late Period

During the late period of his career, Michelangelo worked more and more on architectural designs. These included plans for the plaza at the civic center at Capitoline Hill, (with Luigi Vanvitelli) the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (construction from 1562), and the Sforza Chapel in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore (1561-64). But it was for his work on the St Peter's Basilica that he is best remembered.

It was Pope Julius II who proposed demolishing the old Basilica and replacing it with what he called the "grandest building in Christendom." Although the design by Donato Bramante had been selected in 1505, and foundations laid the following year, little progress had been made since. By the time Michelangelo reluctantly took over the project from his nemesis (Bramante) in 1546 he was in his seventies, stating, "I undertake this only for the love of God and in honor of the Apostle."

Michelangelo worked continuously throughout the rest of his life as Head Architect on the Basilica. His most important personal contribution to the project was his work on the design of the dome at the eastern point of the Basilica. He dismissed all the ideas of previous architects working on the project except for those of the original designs of Bramante who, like him, had envisioned a structure to outdo even Brunelleschi's famous dome in Florence. Although the dome was not finished until after his death, the base on which the dome was to be placed was completed, which meant the final version of the dome remains true in essence to Michelangelo's majestic vision. Still the largest church in the world, the dome is both a Roman landmark (rather than just a functional covering for the building's interior) and a testament to Michelangelo's eternal connection to the city.

Michelangelo's last paintings, produced between 1542-50, were a series of frescos for the private Pauline Chapel in the Vatican. One of these paintings, The Crucifixion of St. Peter , features a horseman wearing a turban and restorers and historians believe that this was in fact a self-portrait of the artist. He continued to sculpt but did so privately for personal pleasure. He completed a number of Pietàs including the Disposition (which he attempted to destroy), as well as his last, the Rondanini Pietà , on which he worked until the last weeks before his death.

Gilbert has observed that a "side effect of Michelangelo's fame in his lifetime was that his career was more fully documented than that of any artist of the time or earlier" and that he was in fact the subject of two important biographies: a first for a living artist. In the final chapter of his series on artists' lives (1550), Vasari "explicitly presented Michelangelo's works as the culminating perfection of art, surpassing the efforts of all those before him". Yet Gilbert explains that Michelangelo "was not entirely pleased" with Vasari's piece and "arranged for his assistant Ascanio Condivi to write a brief separate book (1553); probably based on the artist's own spoken comments". It is, nevertheless, Vasari's "lively writing" and the influence of the book (which was translated into many languages) that "have made it the most usual basis of popular ideas on Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists".

Gombrich notes that in his final years Michelangelo "seemed to retire more and more into himself [...] The poems he wrote show that he was troubled by doubts as to whether his art had been sinful, while his letters make it clear that the higher he rose in esteem in the world, the more difficult and bitter he became. He was not only admired, but feared for his temper, and he spared neither high nor low." His highly secretive and guarded nature, and an incident where, while working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he threw wooden planks at an approaching Pope who he had mistaken for a spy, seems to suggest he suffered with feelings of paranoia. His great companion Tommaso remained with him until his death at home, in Rome, following a short illness in 1564, aged 88. Per his wishes, his body was returned to his beloved Florence and interred at the Basilica di Santa Croce.

The Legacy of Michelangelo

Michelangelo was the undisputed master of sculpting the human form, which he did with such technical aplomb that his marble seemed to almost transform into living flesh and bone. His dexterity with handling human emotions and psychological insights only enhanced his standing and brought him world-wide fame during his own lifetime. He complemented his Pietas , David , and Moses with what is the most famous ceiling fresco in the world, and has made the Vatican City's Sistine Chapel a site of pilgrimage for those with and without faith. Gombrich said of his cupola for St Peters, "As it rises above the city of Rome, supported, it seems, by a ring of twin columns and soaring up with its clean majestic outline, it serves as a fitting monument to the spirit of this singular artist who his contemporaries called 'divine'."

Historians have tracked Michelangelo's influence through the work of such luminaries as Raphael , Peter Paul Rubens , Gian Lorenzo Bernini , and the last great sculptor to follow in his realist tradition, Auguste Rodin . Yet Gilbert makes the point that Michelangelo belongs to a very select and exalted group of artists, which includes William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven, who were able to capture "the tragic experience of humanity with the greatest depth and universal scope", and as such, their "influence on later art is relatively limited." Gilbert's point is that Michelangelo's works (like those of Shakespeare and Beethoven) carry "an almost cosmic grandeur [that] was inhibiting" for those artists who followed and who might aspire to emulate his achievements.

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, meanwhile, likened his own song writing processes to those of Michelangelo. He said in a recent interview, "There's a Duff McKagan song called 'Chip Away,' that has profound meaning for me. It's a graphic song. Chip away, chip away, like Michelangelo, breaking up solid marble stone to discover the form of King David inside. He didn't build him from the ground up, he chipped away the stone until he discovered the king. It's like my own song writing, I overwrite something, then I chip away lines and phrases until I get to the real thing."

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Michelangelo

• Michelangelo: His Epic Life By Martin Gayford
• Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times By William E. Wallace
• Michelangelo: A Biography By George Bull
• Michelangelo Our Pick By Howard Hibbard
• Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame By Michael Hirst
• The Life of Michelangelo By Ascanio Condivi
• The Lives of the Artists By Giorgio Vasari
• Michelangelo, God's Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece By William E. Wallace
• Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara By Eric Scigliano
• Michelangelo's Notebooks: The Poetry, Letters, and Art of the Great Master By Carolyn Vaughan
• The Complete Poems of Michelangelo By Michelangelo
• Michelangelo: The Complete Paintings, Sculptures and Architecture By Frank Zöllner
• Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces By Miles J. Unger
• Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling Our Pick By Ross King
• Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer Our Pick By Carmen C. Bambach
• Michelangelo's Tomb for Julius II: Genesis and Genius By Christoph Luitpold Frommel
• Michelangelo and the Reform of Art Our Pick By Alexander Nagel
• From Marble to Flesh. The Biography of Michelangelo's David Our Pick By A. Victor Coonin
• Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master By Hugo Chapman
• Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculptures, Biography of Michelangelo
• Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Heavenly art Our Pick By Jonathan Jones / The Guardian / March 6, 2006
• Why Michelangelo Matters By Theodore K. Rabb / Commentary Magazine / September 1, 2006
• Michelangelo - The Poetry and the Man By Kara Ross / Art Renewal Centre / January 1, 2008
• Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer - How a Monument Comes Alive By Renato Miracco / iItaly Magazine / January 25, 2018
• David's assets protected as Italy bans images of Michelangelo's famous sculpture By Nick Squires / November 24, 2017
• Michelangelo and his First Biographers By Michael Hirst / Proceedings of the British Academy / 1997
• Michelangelo as Nicodemus: The Florence Pieta By Jane Kristof / The Sixteenth Century Journal / Summer 1989
• Michelangelo and the Medieval Pietà: The Sculpture of Devotion or the Art of Sculpture? Our Pick By Joanna E. Ziegler / Gesta / 1995
• Michelangelo Matter & Spirit
• Smarthistory: Michelangelo, Moses, and the Tomb of Pope Julius II Our Pick
• Smarthistory: Michelangelo, Pietà Our Pick
• Smarthistory: Michelangelo, The Slaves
• Smarthistory: Last Judgment (altar wall, Sistine Chapel)
• Smarthistory: Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Our Pick
• Art History Lesson: Michelangelo Biography: Who Was This Guy, Really?
• Biographics - Michelangelo: The Story of a Sculptor
• Mickey, Teenage Mutant Turtles, named after Michelangelo
• The Simpsons, Season 2, episode 9, (December 20, 1990), Michelangelo's David Protest

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Content compiled and written by Zaid S Sethi

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols , Antony Todd

Timeline: The High Renaissance

In full MICHELANGELO DI LODOVICO BUONARROTI SIMONI (b. March 6, 1475, Caprese, Republic of Florence [Italy]--d. Feb. 18, 1564, Rome), Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint. -- Michelangelo, quoted in Vasari's Lives of the Artists

External links and references: Wikipedia article on Michelangelo

Il Divino Michelangelo

“…those who knew him esteemed him more than his works and those who did not know him esteemed the least part of him, which was his works” – Vittoria Colonna of Pescara [1]

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’s works have endured as some of the most beautiful and revered works in the history of art. His aesthetic communication through the mastery of sculpture, painting, drawing, architecture and poetry has never been rivaled. “He tackled single-handedly the kind of tasks that others approached with teams of assistants.” [2] An artist revered both in his own time and beyond, for possessing a divine understanding of the human condition and wielding the supernatural ability to capture it so purely.

• Introduction
• Young Michelangelo
• In the Garden with Lorenzo de Medici
• The Bacchus
• St. Peter’s Pieta
• In Florence: The David
• The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
• Moses and the Slaves
• San Lorenzo and the Medici Legacy
• The Medici Chapels
• The Laurentian Library
• The Last Judgment
• The Tragedy of the Tomb
• Michelangelo’s Architectural Works In Rome
• St. Peter’s Basilica
• The Florentine Pieta
• The Rondanini Pieta
• The Death of the Divine Michelangelo

The personification of the divine in the hand of Michelangelo is something that elicits a feeling of communion with God and Nature. According to Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo was favored by the Almighty as a man, perfect in every aspect of Art and Poetry, designed to inspire others to follow his artistic example. [3] As it was God who brought life to man, it was Michelangelo who immortalized man’s existence on canvas and in marble.

We can see in Michelangelo three fundamental aspects of his art that illustrate his brilliance and understanding of creating works that elicit an emotional reaction. The first is his use of nudity and an extra-sensory understanding of the human body, unparalleled and rarely equaled, even among artists today. Secondly, his use of grandeur and the creation of a monumental image is done as much for emotional impact as it is for the scientific study of the human body. The third aspect is the noticeable energy perpetually surging through his creations and the communion that has been established with the divine. [4]

It is without question that Michelangelo Buonarroti has had one of the most prestigious careers in the history of art; working with three popes, and the most influential patrons of the Renaissance. One only has to be in the presence of his masterpiece the David to know that there is magnificence in our universe and that Michelangelo has felt it and harnessed it for man. His work on the Sistine Chapel is a depiction of God touching Adam, but more than that, it is a means for all those who gaze upon it to be touched by the divine.

In his own words, Michelangelo shows us why he will always be hailed as the “Divine” and why he will never be rivaled as the ultimate Renaissance man.

“Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.” -Michelangelo [5]

“The very heavens, as much as his own desire, pulled him irresistibly to art, so that he could not stop himself from drawing, whenever he could steal a moment, and from seeking the company of painters.” -Ascanio Condivi [6]

In the family record of the Buonarroti family the birth announcement of Michelangelo read as follows:

“I record that on this day the 6th of March 1474 a son was born to me: I gave him the name of Michelangelo, and he was born on Monday morning, before 4 or 5 o’clock, and he was born to me while I was podesta of Caprese , and he was born at Caprese…he was baptized on the 8th day of the same month in the church of San Giovanni at Caprese.”- Ludovico Di Buonarroti di Simoni [7]

The family in which Michelangelo was born into is often described as an honorable family that was born into hard times. The lineage of his father Ludovico’s family could trace its decent back to the twelfth century and was considered a “privileged citizen” eligible for election into the Signoria . His mother Francesca di Neri was from the Rucellai family, a respected Florentine name who left their mark on the city with a palazzo that still stands today. [8]

When Michelangelo is a month old the office held by his father Ludovico comes to an end and his family returns to Florence. As was common among respected families in Florence at this time, Michelangelo did not return home with his family but was sent to Settignano , an area three miles outside of Florence where a wet-nurse would care for the infant. The nurse responsible for taking care of Michelangelo was married to a stone cutter, no doubt where Michelangelo first learned to work with stone. He is famously recorded by his friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari as saying: “Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer.” [9]

Michelangelo stayed in Settignano until he was about ten years old, returning to Florence in 1485. According to several sources his mother dies when he is six years old and his father remarries Lucrezia Ubaldini. When Michelangelo returns he comes to live with his “father stepmother, four brothers and an uncle in a gloomy house in the Via Bentaccordi near Santa Croce .” [10]

It was at this time that Michelangelo was sent to the school of Francesco da Urbino to learn grammar and the art of writing. Ludovico di Buonarroti was hoping that Michelangelo would focus his efforts toward becoming a lawyer, or some other profession that would bring the family honor. [11]

The pursuit of Michelangelo’s artistic endeavors was not what Ludovico had envisioned for his son. These are the years in which Michelangelo started to show a strong desire to learn and art and to be surrounded by artists. It was at this time that he met and became friends with Francesco Granacci, a student of the famous Italian painter Domenico Ghirlandiao. The friendship between Granacci and Michelangelo was extremely important in the development of the young artists future because of the exposure he would receive to his artistic training. As Michelangelo’s truencies from his lessons began to increase, Ludovico became increasingly infuriated with his son’s disobedience. In a quote from Condivi, Michelangelo’s close friend and biographer he writes:

“he was beaten by his father and brothers for abandoning his studies (grammar and the study of letters) because they thought art as a profession to be a disgrace for their family, but Michelangelo did not turn back and was even motivated to push harder in the study of art.” [12]

It became clear in the year 1488 that Ludovico could not deny the incredible talent of his son Michelangelo, and his relentless pursuit of knowledge for art despite the beatings by his father. He had used his time to copy painting from churches and other famous painters while spending time with his friend Granacci. It was at this time that Michelangelo was apprenticed to Domencio Ghirlandiao, a respected Florentine painter who had been given several important commissions from the Medici in Florence. The terms of the apprenticeship were as follows:

“…this first day of April that I, Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarrota, placed Michelangelo my son, with Domenico and David Ghirlandaio for three years next to come, on these terms and conditions, …shall remain with the above named persons…in order to learn to paint and exercise that vocation.” [13]

During the time Michelangelo was with Ghirlandaio is was evident to the master that his young student was a far better talent than any of the other boys apprenticed to him at that time. It is also said by Vasari that there was a certain jealousy by Domenico that the young Michelangelo was far better at drawing than he. Although Michelangelo would gain great tutorship with Lorenzo di Medeci, Michelangelo was involved in the commission given to Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for the church of Santa Maria Novella .” [14] One of the earliest works by Michelangelo, the engraving of The Temptation of St. Anthony was probably done during this time, along with his other drawings after the masters Giotto and Masaccio . [15]

It will be at this time that Michelangelo will be introduced to Lorenzo de Medici , and be opened to a whole new world of masterpieces and where he will first come in contact with the world he will dominate, as the favorite of the wealthy and powerful patrons of Italy.

“As Athens had led the way among the Greek city states, to the glory that was Greece, so Florence had led the way among the Italian city-states in the revival of learning, The Renaissance…and they were living in the Golden Age [and it was Lorenzo the Magnificent that presided]” [16]

It quickly became obvious that the talent of the young artist was far superior to the other students apprenticed to the workshop of Ghirlandaio. This coupled with the notoriety of the Michelangelo’s master would gain the attention of Bertoldo , a student of Donatello, who was the master of the ‘school for sculptures’ in the garden of Lorenzo de Medici. [17] The school patronized by Lorenzo de Medici was set up to foster the abilities of the most promising painters and sculptors as he was one of the most ardent supporters of the arts. It was well known that Lorenzo had one of the largest and most beautiful collections of sculptures and artifacts from Classical Antiquity, which would prove to be a magnetic factor for Michelangelo. [18]

“From the moment Michelangelo first beheld the sculpture collection of the Medici he never again set foot in a painter’s studio…The ancient statues held him completely enthralled.” [19]

The contract that had been signed between Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo’s father, Ludovico, was for a period of three years but early in the year of 1489 Michelangelo would break that contract. [20] The school headed by Bertoldo and funded by Lorenzo de Medici would become the temporary home of Michelangelo as “he ‘had unlimited opportunities to cultivate himself and learn his art.’ In his garden were a vast array of subjects in miniature (because there was no photographic evidence of statues from classical antiquity) which makes it all the more impressive that Michelangelo was able to train his eye to see in the monumental without physical evidence of large-scale masterpieces.” [21]

While under the tutorship of Bertoldo, Michelangelo gained the attention of Lorenzo de Medici not only because of Lorenzo’s worry that he had far more talented painters than he did sculptors but because of the clear “genius” that was already evident in his work. In an anecdote about one of the early interactions between Michelangelo and Lorenzo, there is the story of a sculpture he is asked to re-create from the collection of the Medici.

“Michelangelo, who had never yet touched marble or chisels, succeeded so well in counterfeiting [the head of the faun], that the Magnificent Lorenzo was astonished.” [22]

The story famously continues that Lorenzo joked with the young Michelangelo that he had made the faun old and left him all of his teeth. Lorenzo said to Michelangelo: “Don’t you know that old men of that age are always missing a few [teeth]? As soon as Lorenzo left the Michelangelo he removed the top tooth as if it had fallen out from the root and couldn’t wait for his master to return so that he may show him the change. When he returned he laughed at the boy’s eagerness to please and the goodness of his intentions. It was at this point that Lorenzo asked Michelangelo to join his household and to live as one of his children, in an effort to “help and encourage such great genius.” [23]

Lorenzo de Medici was Michelangelo’s first protector and patron, a role he cherished the way a father would cherish a son. While in the house of Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo will carve two of his earliest works, marble reliefs: The Madonna of the Stairs , and Battle of the Centaurs . The relief of the “Virgin” is carved in the style of mezzo-rilievo , or low relief, a style which had been used by Donatello. [24] This piece was probably an assignment given by Bertoldo and was carved on a valuable slab of white marble.

“From the moment Michelangelo leaves off copying and invents his own compositions, his personality is such that he is “bound to identify his emotions with his ideas.” [Michelangelo] treats the age old theme of the Madonna and Child in ways that are astonishingly unconventional, and yet the carving suggests that it represents the boy’s first independent conception.” [25]

With the carving of the Battle of the Centaurs , we can see one of Michelangelo’s first attempts at recreating the body and his early mastery of the human form. According to Vasari, Michelangelo was permitted to dissect human bodies to learn the human anatomy. His access at the church of Santo Spirito was granted to him by the clergy because of his work on a crucifix he was commissioned to create for the church. [26] This relief was suggested by Poliziano , a humanist poet that spent time with the artists and scholars under the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici. This relief shows

“athletic male nudes linked in close embrace, with set faces and sensually expressive bodies…and is a virtuoso exercise in the portrayal of the lineaments and facets of the human body.” [27]

On April 8, 1492 Michelangelo would mourn the loss of Lorenzo de Medici, the first patron and supporter of his genius. After the death of Lorenzo, Piero de Medici asks Michelangelo to stay in the Medici palace where he will create a life size statue of Hercules and a wooden crucifix. After a short two years with Piero, Michelangelo flees to Bologna then to Venice due to the invasion of Charles VIII and his french army. [28] It is also at this time that the Medici are flee from Florence because of the ever increasing support for the powerful man of God, Savonarola . Due to a lack of work in Venice, Michelangelo will return to Bologna, where he became employed by Messer Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi. In his employ he would carve an Angel holding a candlebrum and a statue of Saint Petronio for which he was paid thirty ducats.(Vasari, 221) [29]

When the atmosphere in Michelangelo’s native city of Florence had calmed down, he returned to the city of his birth where his commissioned once again by the Medici. Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de Medici asks Michelangelo to sculpt a statue of St. John and Eros.It was at this time that only the powerfully rich were patronizing the arts because of the influence of Savonarola and the disparagement of the arts. The opportunity for art commissions in an environment such as this would prove to be harder and harder to come by. In spite of this fact Michelangelo created carved a sculpture of the Cupid. Because Michelangelo needed money Pierfrancesco de Medici suggested that he:

“had contacts in Rome who could sell his sculpture, Sleeping Cupid, for nearly as much as an antiquity. Whether the Cupid was made before or after Lorenzo proposed this deception is a moot point…but the plan went off like clockwork. Within weeks Michelangelo pocketed thirty ducats.” [30]

Later that year a man would come to Michelangelo because of his increasing reputation as a master sculpture. The man asked for a drawing as proof of his talent and Michelangelo drew the exact Cupid he had sculpted and sold unwittingly as a fake to Cardinal Raffaele Riario The man, probably, Jacopo Galli, was appalled that that sculpture was a “Florentine fake.” [31]

This deception would infuriate Michelangelo and in June of 1496 Michelangelo would go to Rome to try in vain to get his sculpture back. The statue would be sold to Cesare Borgia, and would later end up in the collection of Isabella d’Este. Nevertheless, Michelangelo would stay in Rome and begin a career that will rival his contemporaries. [32]

The early works of Michelangelo are milestones on the “early road toward the kind of perfection that moves, ennobles and enriches the mind, not only of the individual, but of mankind. It is in Michelangelo’s Pieta,…that profound sentiment and exalted mastery are blended.” [33]

Once in Rome Michelangelo started his career in the service of Cardinal Raffaele Riario , based on the recommendation of the banker and patron of the arts Jacopo Galli. In a letter to Pierfrancesco de Medici Michelangelo stated that he had introduced himself to the bankers Poalo Ruccellai and Cavalcanti on the commendation of Lorenzo de Medici after being received positively by Cardinal Riario. [34] These relationships would prove to be beneficial and even inspiring to Michelangelo in his early time in the former center of the Roman Empire. In Florence Michelangelo could not hope for the rich commissions and opportunities to study the unrivaled collections of antiquities as he could in Rome. [35]

Michelangelo would get one of his first major commissions to sculpt a life size statue of the classical god, Bacchus during this first trip to Rome. It is unsure as to who commissioned the work of Michelangelo’s Bacchus reports are divided between Cardinal Riario, which Michelangelo may have lived for a year while in Rome, or Jacopo Galli, Michelangelo’s banker and friend. According to Linda Murray in her book, Michelangelo:

“It is possible that the statues [Bacchus and Eros] may have been commissioned for the cardinal, who possibly relinquished to his friend, since he apparently had little taste for ‘modern’ antiquities. “Galli placed this statue of Bacchus in his garden along with his many other Roman statues and fragments; where it had been mutilated by the removal of an arm, apparently to make it look more antique.” [36]

“…[my] marble Bacchus ten palmi in height whose form and appearance correspond in every particular to the description of the ancient authors. The face of the youth is joyful in the eyes,…are like the eyes of those who are too much possessed by the love of Wine.” These words were written by Condivi and approved by Michelangelo in 1533 to describe the drunken Bacchus created for, according to Condivi, “Galli, a Roman gentleman of fine intelligence.” Michelangelo goes on to describe the composition if the sculpture by saying that the Bacchus “holds the cup in his right hand, as if about to drink, and gazes at it like one who takes pleasure that liquor which was invented.” Michelangelo tells Condivi that it is this reason that he has wreathed the head with a garland of vine leaves. He also explains that the reason he has draped a tiger skin over his left shoulder is to show that this is the beast that is dedicated to him. Michelangelo explains to Condivi that: “[he] represented the skin instead of the animal to signify that he who allows his senses to be overcome by that appetite for that fruit and its liquor, ultimate loses its life to it.” The theme of the statue is perfectly explained in Michelangelo’s own words to Condivi. His thought is that “with drunkenness replacing blood lust as a vice that reduces men to beasts.” [37]

Michelangelo’s statue of the Bacchus is considered to be “technically among the artist’s most splendid achievements. Michelangelo was not enthusiastic about the subject. Abstemious himself, he found no pleasure in wine, and yet the figure of Bacchus was quite uncongenial to his thinking. Yet that did not stop him from creating a masterpiece, if a somewhat repellent one.” Previous statues of Bacchus glorify him as a God of Wine and exuberance but Michelangelo has portrayed him as the God of Gluttony. [38] The issues surrounding the terms of the commission and the payment for the Bacchus are left to speculation, but it is widely accepted that Michelangelo had problems collecting payment for the statue. This coupled with the deceitfulness of Pierfrancesco de Medici left the young artist in need of a new patron. [39]

See photos and read more about Michelangelo’s Bacchus .

“It is a miracle that a stone without shape should have been reduced to such perfection.” -Giorgio Vasari [40]

Jacopo Galli, model patron that he was, wanted to share his joy in Michelangelo’s work with other men of sensibility. This is why in 1497 Michelangelo is introduced to French Cardinal Jean Bilheres de Lagraulas who after being the papal emissary for Rome realized that Rome would be his final resting place and that he wanted to leave something behind for posterity. The Cardinal wanted to leave behind a souvenir of himself and his country which is why he asked Michelangelo to create a Pieta for his tomb. It was Galli who vouched for the young artists genius, and the reason Michelangelo was chosen for such a prestigious commission. [41]

The French Cardinal had set his final resting place to be St. Petronillo, an ancient mausoleum adjacent to St. Peter’s, Later converted into a chapel under the protection of the French Crown. [42] The French Cardinal asked Michelangelo to create a Pieta which literally means the “pity.” This was typically a French treatment of the Madonna and her slain son, not typically depicted in this manner in Italy until Michelangelo’s Pieta. Jacopo Galli would construct a contract with the French Cardinal for the creation of the Pieta where he promised:

“that the Pieta would be finished within a year, and that it would be the finest statue in Rome-such that no living artist could better it.” [43]

Michelangelo could not wait to get started on this project, so in 1498 Michelangelo would go to the town of Carrara to acquire a perfect piece of marble for the Pieta. The reason that Michelangelo needed to travel all the way to Carrara for marble is that the marble in Rome was mediocre at best, showing noticeable veins or was unusable. [44] While in Carrara Michelangelo “saw for the first time the marble quarries that were to preoccupy him so deeply and take up such an inordinate share of his precious time. [45]

When Michelangelo returned to Rome with the marble he would use for the Pieta , “which would be very important in acquiring the official contract from Cardinal Bilheres. The contract is “a legal document that makes a cultural statement.” The contract would be brokered by Jacopo Galli and signed by the Michelangelo and the French Cardinal in 1498. The main points of the contract read as follows:

“Be it known and manifest to all who shall read this present writing that the most revered Cardinal di San Dionisio has agreed that Maestro Michelangelo,…shall at his own proper costs make a Pieta of marble that is to say a draped figure of the Virgin Mary with the dead Christ in her arms, the figures being life-sized,…to be finished within the term of one year.” [46]

When Michelangelo returned to Rome it took Michelangelo not the agreed upon one year to finish the Pieta , but he would not finish the statue until two years after he started the project. The French cardinal would not see the Pieta in its completion as he died before Michelangelo could give him a finished sculpture. [47]

The reception to Michelangelo’s Pieta was that of dual opinion. Many thought the work to be the work of a divine hand and without error. Others questioned Michelangelo’s choices for some of the aspects in the sculpture. One main question of Michelangelo’s contemporaries had for the young artists was why he had made the Virgin younger in appearance than her dead son. In a conversation between biographer Condivi and Michelangelo on the objection to why the Virgin is so young, Michelangelo says:

“Don’t you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not? How much more so a virgin who was never touched by even the slightest lascivious desire which might alter her body? Indeed, I will go further and say that this freshness and flowering of youth, apart from being preserved in her in this natural way, may also have conceivably have been given divine assistance in order to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the mother. This was not necessary with the son.” [48]

Michelangelo goes on to say that to show that Christ was a real man, the human embodiment of god, it was important to show his real age, and that he submitted to all the ordinary things that a man undergoes, except sin. Therefore Michelangelo says his decision to show the mother younger than the son is explainable and unarguable from a theological viewpoint.

The reception of the Pieta would make Michelangelo a force to be reckoned with in the art world. “Though it showed that Michelangelo was still using the drill as well as the chisel, but the Pieta was technically brilliant. Life studies and dissection had so deepened Michelangelo’s understanding of anatomy…he imparted unprecedented physical verisimilitude and grace.” [49] After the Pieta was finished, the year was 1500, and under the Borgia papacy no commissions were given to Michelangelo. It was at this time that Michelangelo started to write his own poetry based on his readings mainly of Petrarch in Galli’s Library. [50]

Michelangelo would return to Florence at the request of his father due to the economic hardship that had fallen on the family. “In the spring of 1501, the artist was back home , after an absence of four years. He returned as one who, with a single masterpiece, had proved that at the age of twenty-six he could lay claim to being the foremost sculptor of his country and age, even though at the time a superhuman like Leonardo da Vinci was still living and working.” [51]

See photos and read more about Pieta .

: The David

“Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.” -Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi [52]

After the turn of the century, Florence experienced a surge of intellectual renewal. The Italian city state fought hard to re-institute its “constitutional balance and vigour, its territorial authority, and an environment that welcomed the best artists into its service.” [53] It the expulsion of the religious leader of Savanorola, and the renewal of the Florentine Republic which made returning to Florence an attractive move for Michelangelo.

During the time of Savonorola there was a negative attitude toward the arts because the puritanical religious leader saw the movement of many artists and thinkers toward Neoplatanism as sinful. This was a much different than the attitude of the Medici controlled Florence where the arts flourished. Savonorola had so much influence that he had the Medici expelled, defied the Pope and burned precious works of art, jewelry, cosmetics, and heretical writings in the Bonfire of the Vanities . [54]

The influence of Savonorola was a large catalyst in Michelangelo’s decision to go to Rome in the late 1400’s and ultimately why he stayed for 5 years. In a grand gesture by the people of Florence, Savonorola and two of his supporters were arrested at the Church of San Marco by an angry mob. Savonarola was imprisoned for six weeks in the Palazzo della Signorina, and under extreme torture finally signed a document confessing that all of his revelations were false. In 1948, Savonorola would be burnt at the stake Palazzo della Signoria along with his two supporters and Florence would finally declare themselves a free Republic. [55]

It would be in this new era of Florentine revival that Michelangelo would create the larger than life statue of the David. It would be this statue that would represent the resilient city-state’s symbol of pride and its message to the world that Florence would be a force to be reckoned with. It would be in 1501 that the Florence Cathedral building committee would ask Michelangelo to work on a great block of marble left over from an earlier aborted commission. [56]

According to Michelangelo’s friend Condivi, The commission for the statue the Florentines called the Giant would come about in this way:

“The operai of Santa Maria del Fiore owned a block of marble nine braccia high, which had been bought from Carrara a hundred years earlier by an artist who, from what one could see, was not as experienced as he should have been…he had roughed it out in the quarry but in such a way that neither he or anyone else ever had the courage to lay a hand to it to carve a statue.” [57]

In a note in the margin of Michelangelo’s contract with the Opera del Duomo it states that:

“Michelangelo began to work and carve the Giant on 13 September 1501, a Monday. Previously on the 9th, he had given it one or two blows with his hammer to strike off a certain knot that it had on its chest…which must have been an earlier remnant of the earlier sculptor’s attempt. By knocking it off, Michelangelo declared his independence from the block’s past.” [58]

Michelangelo was well aware of the Republican symbolism of the David . He knew that the intent of the statue was not only to elicit pride from Florentines but to bring a sense of Republican obligation to fight for the Italian city-state. “The David has a long symbolic heritage derived not only from Biblical history but also from the antique in its echoes of Hercules triumphing through strength over the labors inflicted upon him by tyranny… [where Michelangelo] had made a new statement of an old theme, given a new monumentality.” [59] Michelangelo knew that this sculpture was important to not only the physical ambiance of Florence but as a symbolic message to the rest of the world that Florence would not be beaten with out a fight.

The monumental sculpture has been described as:

“Youth, full of latent energy and strength, with huge limbs and a watchful uncertain expression on his sharply delineated features. One massive hand dangles against the right thigh the other raised to hold the sling, so that the long line of the open left-hand silhouette contrasts with the closed forms on the right.” [60]

One aspect of the David which would have stood out to the Renaissance contemporaries of Michelangelo is the scowl of the young hero. In the Bible David was the ‘Lion of Judah,’ and the ancient symbol for Florence was the Lion. In the scowl on Davids face, Michelangelo was using this link to create not just a beautiful piece of art, but a theological statement about Florence. In an article by David Summers he states that: “a cloudy brow signifies self-will as in the Lion” This was a well known fact among Renaissance artists and Michelangelo exploited this artistic attribute. Summers goes on to say that: “the clouded-brow, as seen on the David, is the vice of those who little consider the difficulty of some great act, [such as killing Goliath], and presuming too much of their own powers, believe they will easily attain their end.” [61]

As a study in the human form and the Classical nude Michelangelo created in the David the perfect man. His study of human anatomy, in drawing and as a young adult dissecting bodies in Florence no doubt prepared him to complete the masterpiece. Michelangelo has captured the energy of the moment in the marble while using the anatomy of the young hero to express the emotion in this tense moment.

“His rugged torso, sturdy limbs, and large hands and feet alert the viewers to the strength to come. Each swelling vein and tightening sinew amplifies the psychological energy of the monumental David’s pose.” [62]

The reception of Michelangelo’s David in 1504 was received with great gratitude and appreciation from the Florentines. But Michelangelo had completed several other important works during this time including the sculptures of: the Bruges Madonna with the Christ Child , the Tondo Pitti , and the Tondo Taddei . In addition to these sculptures, Michelangelo created one of the only surviving paintings on Canvas; the Doni Tondo where Michelangelo paints the Holy family. [63]

The Bruges Madonna with the Christ child was commissioned by the Flemish merchant Alexandre de Mouscron. This marble sculpture would come five years after the Vatican Pieta and would bear striking similarities, mainly the young appearance of the Madonna. This sculpture was carved from a single piece of Carrara marble, and is an interpretation of the popular scene in which “Michelangelo evokes from a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci in order to reject it. In this version Mary makes no attempt to restrain her son from the mission foretold in her prayer book.” Michelangelo portrays the virgin with a ‘face of stone,’ not to question the love of her child but to show that “her self restraint makes her exemplary of virtuous stoicism in the face of pain.” [64]

The Doni Tondo was a round painting made for Agnolo Doni, a Florentine citizen, by Michelangelo around the same time as the Bruges Madonna. According to Condivi Michelangelo took the commission “in order not to abandon painting altogether.” [65] It is clear that is painting is the work of a sculptor, not only because of the draping of the material on the holy family but because of the male nude figures in the background. The work is monumental and hard edged, much like many of Michelangelo’s sculptures. It is also evident that the three figures of the Madonna, Christ child and Joseph seemed to be painted as if they were carved from the same piece of stone. This painting is significant because it is the only surviving paintings that was not done directly onto a wall or ceiling. [66]

After this sojourn in Florence Michelangelo would once again return to Rome to begin on what is said to be his life’s masterpiece; The Sistine Chapel.

“A passionate desire for posthumous glory was a leading motive for men of the Renaissance, whatever their calling. The example of antiquity-and of Roman eulogies-taught that great men became immortal through either words or monuments.” [67]

In 1505 Michelangelo would once again leave Florence for Rome, at the request of Pope Julius II . “It was Giuliano da San Gallo who had called the Pope’s attention to Michelangelo, whom he had known ever since the days the half-grown youth enjoyed the favor of Lorenzo de Medici.” [68] Michelangelo and Julius II would have many discussions about his tomb as it was very important for a papal leader to leave behind a legacy. In April of 1505 the pope would approve one of Michelangelo’s drawings for the tomb, and in a quote, Michelangelo said that:

“the papal mausoleum would surpass in beauty and pride, richness of ornamentation, and abundance of statuary, every ancient Imperial tomb.” [69]

It was discussed that the tomb was to portray Julius as the patron of learning and the seven liberal arts- grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music- as well as painting, sculpture and architecture. It was agreed that the tomb would be finished within five years and that the tomb would consist of a large marble edifice and include over forty statues. With excitement for the project Michelangelo would leave for Carrara at once to obtain the finest marble for the project. [70]

When Michelangelo first started the tomb Pope Julius was extremely excited about the project and it was reported that he would check in on the artist from time to time to check on the progress. To make it easier to visit the “Pope even had a movable bridge built to Michelangelo’s work room… so that he could see him at his work in his rooms.” [71] But for Michelangelo the project would turn out to be more work that he had anticipated. Michelangelo was managing everything by himself and being pulled in several different directions. He had to deal with money, coordinating workers, securing workspace, and living Quarters. Before this had all been taken care of for him by his patron. In addition to the strain on Michelangelo from internal problems, the pope would soon become uninterested in seeing the tomb come to fruition and Michelangelo would once again flee Rome. [72]

At the outset of the planning for the tomb it was agreed that it would be placed inside St. Peter’s Basilica . But at this time the church was dilapidated and needed to be restored. Pope Julius would hire the architect Bramante for the new St. Peters, and lose interest in the tomb he commissioned from Michelangelo. It was clear that Julius became strangely uninterested in the tomb, advanced no money to Michelangelo for expenses and soon Michelangelo would see less and less of the Pope. [73] In 1506 Michelangelo is invited to dinner with Pope. He overhears the Pontiff tell the jewelry maker that “he did not wish to spend one baiocco more on small stones or large ones.” This was no doubt a play on words and a subtle comment to Michelangelo. [74]

Shortly after this dinner, Michelangelo went to Julius to obtain payment for all the marble he had quarried for the project and the work done so far and Julius refused to see Michelangelo. Julius had insulted Michelangelo so much, that he left Rome by horseback for Florence without alerting the Pope. When San Gallo wrote to Michelangelo to ask why he had left Rome in such a hurry, he explained that his patience had run out. In Michelangelo’s eyes the Pope had humiliated him. In the letter Michelangelo describes the incident that would lead to his departure.

“I asked the Pope for part of what I needed in order to pursue the work. His Holiness answered that I should return on Monday. And I did return on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday…Finally on Friday morning I was sent away, or rather driven out, and the person who sent me packing said he knew me but he was under orders.”

He goes onto tell San Gallo to give a message to the Pope.

“Let his Holiness understand that I am disposed more than I ever was to pursue the work, and if he himself is absolutely determined to build the tomb it should not annoy him wherever I do it…So if his Holiness wishes to proceed, let him make me over the deposit here in Florence…And I would send the things as I made them…so that His Holiness would be able to enjoy them just as much as if I had been in Rome.” [75]

According to Condivi, “during the months Michelangelo stayed in Florence three papal briefs were sent to the Signori, full of threats, commanding that he should be sent back by fair means or by force.” [76] In 1506 Michelangelo would go to Bologna to meet with Julius as the pope was there to occupy the city in the course of his war against Perugia and Bologna. While in Bologna Michelangelo begs the Pontiff for his actions and hasty retreat from Florence. The Pope pardons Michelangelo and gives him a commission to create a bronze statue of himself to commemorate his exploits as a successful warrior pope. [77]

“What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterwards appear, however much it was laboured, to have been done quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not” -From Four Dialogues on Painting by Francisco de Hollanda [78]

After his stay in Bologna, Michelangelo went back to Florence, but was summoned again by the Pope in 1508 to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Pope Julius II had lost fervor for the tomb project as he wished to create a new St. Peters, along with the painting of the Sistine Chapel. This project would be very important to Julius because the building and frescoes already finished in the Chapel had been a family project, begun by his uncle Pope Sixtus IV. [79] As San Gallo, had suggested that Michelangelo take on the tomb for the Pope, he would also suggest that the artist decorate the ceiling of the chapel by way of compensation, setting the fee at fifteen thousand floren. [80]

Michelangelo disappointed that he could not finish the tomb project that he had devoted so much time to, reluctantly went to to Rome, not wanting to fall out of favor of the pope. According to Condivi:

“Michelangelo, who had not yet used colors and who realized that it was difficult to paint a vault, made every effort to get out of it…pleading that this was not his art and that he would not succeed; and he went on refusing to such an extent that the Pope almost lost his temper. But, when he saw that the pope was determined, he embarked on that work which is to be seen today in the papal palace to the admiration and amazement of the world…” [81]

Michelangelo contracted to begin the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, wrote in his Journal:

“I record how on this day, the 10th of May, 1508, I, Michelangelo, sculptor, have received from the Holiness our Lord Pope Julius II, 500 ducats of the Camera…on account of the painting of the vault of the Sistine Chapel, on which I begin to work.” [82]

Almost immediately Michelangelo realized that there were some very visible obstacles in undertaking such a momentous task as painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Of the most daunting would be: his inexperience with the fresco technique, the ceilings dimensions, the height above the pavement (almost 70 feet), and the complicated perspective problems presented by the vault’s height and curve. [83]

One of these obstacles would manifest itself very early on as Michelangelo made the mistake applying the plaster too wet while painting the scene of the Flood , described in the Old Testament. Michelangelo would run in to problems with applying the plaster too wet, ruining his work. Michelangelo claiming he was to inexperienced with plaster, tried in vain to ask the pope to give the commission to his contemporary Raphael. The pope denied Michelangelo’s request primarily because he wanted Michelangelo on the project, but secondly because the problem of the plaster was pointed out to him, and relayed to the reluctant artist. [84]

The Sistine chapel ceiling is:

“a symphony of human forms. They are coordinated or subordinated, superimposed and rhythmic, on different scales from giant to child, some naked, some clothed, in marble, bronze or flesh-forms which present themselves in isolation or in groups, acting simultaneously, but always dominated by the strict lines of the architectural framework.”

The barrel vault design of the chapel has several architectural facets, an attribute Michelangelo would use to his advantage. He used the shape of the vault as inspiration as opposed to other artists that tried to camouflage the shape. [85]

The overall theme of the chapel includes: “The Creation, Fall, and Redemption of Humanity. “Michelangelo spread a colossal decorative scheme across a vast surface, weaving together more than 300 figures in an ultimate grand drama of the human race.” Michelangelo was able to complete a monumental fresco incorporating the patron’s agenda, Church doctrine, along with his own interests. [86]

In the beginning Michelangelo had sent for assistants for the project as many well respected artists of the time would. But shortly after the work began Michelangelo he sent them away and shut himself away in the chapel, determined to do the work on his own. This was characteristic of Michelangelo to do the work himself, while other artists were having helpers Michelangelo knew that to do every part himself and not delegating simpler details that it would be the genius of his work because it meant something to him to be a part of every aspect. [87]

The relationship between Michelangelo and Julius II was tumultuous to say the least. The pope was constantly asking Michelangelo when he would be able to unveil the chapel to the world, and this infuriated Michelangelo. It was recorded by Condivi in his biography that the pope would go to the Chapel and climb the scaffolding up to the ceiling where Michelangelo would lend him a hand at the top. It was also said that Michelangelo wanted to finish certain aspects of the chapel but because of the impatient nature of the pope he was unable to make these finishing touches. [88]

There were times when Michelangelo would takes breaks, usually when the the money ran out and Julius had to be asked for money. [89] Other than these short breaks Michelangelo would work for long periods of time, shutting himself inside that chapel. He would work so long that he complained about his eyes, as he would lay on his back and look up at the ceiling for ungodly amounts of time. He often complained that “to read a letter or other detailed things, hold them with his arms up over his head.” [90]

The most famous of the depictions of scenes from the Old Testament painted by Michelangelo are the central figures of God and Adam . Michelangelo chose to depict the exact moment that God brings Adam to being and creates man. Michelangelo in all his genius made a very conscious decision not to depict this scene as it had been traditionally painted by other artists. In essence Michelangelo depicted this, and the other figures from the Old Testament in a very humanistic way. The depiction of the Lord as the ruler of heaven in the Olympian pagan sense indicates how easily High Renaissance thought joined classical and Christian traditions. Yet the classical images do not obscure the essential Christian message. [91]

Michelangelo’s approach to the ceiling is based in the architectural framework by which he “divides the vault into three superimposed zones, and a threefold hierarchy of content corresponds with these three topographically and stylistically distinct areas.” In the first zone Michelangelo depicts humanity in the level of existence which is not yet spiritually conscious. In the second zone, sit the Prophets and Sibyls , who although they are part of the human race, are at the same time gifted with supernatural powers. The third zone contains the gradual revelation of the Divine perceived, by the figures in the second, while the first zone appears in the imperfect form of man imprisoned in his body. The function of this separation of zones assumes a progressively more perfect shape until it becomes a Cosmic being (God). [92]

On All Saint’s Day , October 31, 1512, the chapel was opened for public viewing. It was said by Vasari that:

“[The Sistine Chapel] was a lamp for our art which casts abroad luster enough to illuminate the world.” And had “put himself above the reach of envy.” [93]

“Let whoever may have attained so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure; he will be able to make figures higher than any tower, both painted and as statues, and he will find no wall or side of a building that will not prove narrow and small for his great imaginings.” -Michelangelo to Francisco de Hollanda [94]

In 1513, four months after the unveiling of the Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II died. Soon after his death Michelangelo would sign a new contract, with the heir of Julius II, his nephew Cardinal Aginensis. It would be at this time that Michelangelo would have one of his longest periods of uninterrupted work. From 1513 to 1516 he worked on the tomb for Julius II almost without interruption. He Started to carve the famous statue of Moses and Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave. Michelangelo also did much of the structural and architectural decoration for the base of the tomb. [95]

After Julius’ death, Michelangelo was “forced to reduce the scale of the project step-by-step until, in 1542, a final contract specified a simple wall tomb with fewer than one-third of the originally planned figures.” [96] The statue of Moses would eventually be the grand masterpiece of the tomb, and considered by many to be one of the artists most beautiful works.

Moses was a figure that Michelangelo had always been fascinated with; as he was a legendary prophet that was the liberator and founder of his people. Michelangelo chose to show us the seated Moses from the front, with his head turned to one side.

“Moses’ flaring anger at the faithlessness of his people provides Michelangelo with the motive for the contrast between the right and left halves of the body. There is in this figure an overwhelming surge of energy not even remotely equaled by any subsequent representation of Moses.” [97]

The horns on top of Moses head were placed there to be a symbol of “light”, a translation from the Hebrew bible which would be misinterpreted throughout the Renaissance. The horns referred to as the “horns of Illumination,” were probably used by Michelangelo to show that Moses had been bestowed divine favor immediately after he received the Tables of Law from the Lord on Mt. Sinai. [98]

According to Vasari: “there was no other work to be seen, whether ancient or modern, which could rival the [Moses].” Vasari goes on to say that the picturesque treatment of the hair “might lead one to believe that the chisel had become a brush.” [99]

To accompany the statue of the Moses for the tomb of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo also sculpted two statues of slaves, called the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Captive. It would be one of the tragedies of the tomb that these sculptures would not be used in the scaled back version of the tomb because there would not be enough room in the reduced design. According to Condivi:

“Between the niches there should have been statues who were bound like captives. These represented the liberal arts and in the same way painting, sculpture, and architecture, each statue with its attributes, making them easily recognizable. This was to signify that all the noble arts had died at the same time as Pope Julius II.” [100]

See photos and read more about Michelangelo’s Moses .

Shortly after the death of Julius II, Giovanni de Medici was elected Pope and he took the name Leo X . Shortly after his ascension to power Leo named his brother Guilio de Medici the Cardinal of Florence, creating a Medici controlled Florence and Rome.

Leo X, being much like his father, Lorenzo de Medici, wanted to foster the artists of Italy for the glory of the Medici legacy. The new pope subsidized scholars, writers, poets, composers, and musicians. In addition he acquired classical and Christian manuscripts, founded a college, and supported archeological scholarship. Leo’s goal of keeping the beautification programs instituted by his predecessor, Julius II, were evident in the way he used the papal funds. [101]

At this time it was well known that church of San Lorenzo was the Medici church as it was where Lorenzo the Magnificent was buried, and located right behind the newly erected Palazzo Medici . The church was redone by Filippo Brunelleschi , the master architect responsible for the dome on top of the Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. It was also well known that Michelangelo was the undisputed master of painting and sculpture when the Medici took power, and “what the Pope really wanted was to harness the master’s genius to the greater glory of the house of Medici.” [102]

Leo X knew that he wanted Michelangelo to create works of art that would glorify his papacy and the Medici. He also knew that Michelangelo was contractually obligated to the heirs of Pope Julius II for the seemingly never ending tomb commission. Leo X wanting to enlist Michelangelo knew he had to wait for the tomb of Julius to be finished because of his close relationship to the former pope. The contract Michelangelo signed with the heirs of Julius included the stipulation that the artists may not take any other projects until the tomb was finished- a clause no doubt added to keep Leo X from monopolizing the artist. But in the end Leo would persuade Michelangelo, and Condivi writes that he had an attack of conscience;

“making all the resistance he could, saying he was bound to Julius’s executors and could not fail them.” and the pope replied: “Leave me to deal with them; I will content them…and he sent for them and made them release Michelangelo.” [103]

In 1516, Pope Leo X traveled to Florence for the celebration of St. Andrew’s Day and went of course to visit the grave of his father in San Lorenzo. It was said that he was “observed to shed some tears at the sepulcher of his father.” This emotional visit was undoubtedly one of the reasons that Leo decided that despite the lavish interior of San Lorenzo, a facade for the unadorned church was imperative to the Medici legacy in Florence. Of course the pope would turn his thoughts to Michelangelo to complete the sculptures and reliefs for the facade, but had no idea he would be so interested in the architectural aspects of the project as well. [104]

Michelangelo liked to picture himself as being torn away from his work on Julius’ tomb, but the evidence shows that he wanted the entire San Lorenzo commission for himself. As well as putting forward a design for the facade, he proposed to execute the numerous sculptures and decorations himself, rejecting the possibility of contributions from even his most distinguished contemporaries. [105] The agreement for the facade was made on January 19, 1518 and was for the adornment and decoration of the facade of San Lorenzo and stipulated that he should work continuously and finish the project within eight years, for the price of 40,000 gold ducats . [106]

During the years of 1517-1518 Michelangelo would also make a wooden model for the facade which pleased Leo greatly. [107] Michelangelo in his usual fashion, became excited about the project, and knew that if it were to be great that he must do it all himself. He wrote to Leo saying:

“I feel it in me to make of this facade of San Lorenzo [a work] such that shall be a mirror of architecture and sculpture to all Italy.” [108]

After the agreement between Michelangelo and the Medici Pope, the artist would spend much time in the quarries trying to obtain the marble to be used for the project, and making drawings for the facade. But, Michelangelo would work on the project for three years with little to no progress. This delay was mainly due to the fiasco of the marble and where it would be quarried from. According to Condivi the pope had heard that there was a place in Tuscany called Pietra Santa , that had marble of the same beauty and quality as those at Carrara, Michelangelo’s preferred quarry. The pope wrote to Michelangelo and asked him to verify that these statements were true. According to Condivi, Michelangelo responded to the pope saying:

“That he found marbles that were very difficult to work with and not really suitable; and, even if they had been suitable, it was difficult and very expensive to transport them to the coast, as it was necessary to build a good many roads through the mountains…” [109]

In response the Pope said to build the road, and so Michelangelo had the road built. For several months Michelangelo worked on the task of obtaining the marble, but when he returned to Florence, the pope had lost interest in the project, and on March 10, 1520, Leo X canceled the facade project. This would not be unusual as the Medici pope was known for his erratic finances. In his own words Michelangelo writes a letter discussing the details of the abrupt end to the project.

“The Cardinal at the pope’s behest told me not to proceed further with the aforementioned work, because they said they wished to relieve me of the trouble of transporting the marbles,…and this is how the matter stands today.” [110]

Before Michelangelo would enter into a new contract with the Medici, he would sculpt The Risen Christ for the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva . It was commissioned by Bernardo Cencio, Canon of St. Peter’s, Maria Scapucci, and Metello Vari in 1514, and was to be a nude standing figure holding a cross. The best parts of the statue are “the torso, in particular the abdomen and the whole of the back, the arms and the knees.” The project was started in 1514 but because of a black line in the marble the project was scrapped and a new piece of marble was obtained in 1519. The statue was finished in 1521 and sent from Florence to Rome to be installed in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. [111]

“The greatest artist has no concept which is not already contained within the marble, and it can be reached only by the hand which obeys the intellect.” [112]

Michelangelo would start on the work for the Medici Tombs in 1521, and would be commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de Medici, with support from his brother Pope Leo X. [113] According to Giorgio Vasari: “Michelangelo wanted everything about the new building- the structural appearance, supporting elements, conception of space, architectural decoration and ornament- to be totally original and unexpected.” This would be something that Michelangelo would struggle with though, as he felt that he was severely restricted by the need to echo Brunelleschi’s scheme for the Old Sacristy as close as possible. [114]

The history of the tomb project goes back to Cosimo de Medici , as he was the grandfather of the Medici family. The Medici commissioned several works from Brunelleschi, the famous Florentine architect, for the construction of the Basilica of San Lorenzo , which would be the Medici church, exclusively. Cosimo had his own intentions for the church of San Lorenzo as a family mausoleum and may have made plans known to Brunelleschi for those plans in the 15th century. It is widely believed that long before Michelangelo was called into the Medici tombs project, the Basilica of San Lorenzo had a decisive funerary function for the Medici family.

The death of Giuliano de Medici in 1516 was the impetuous for the project of the tomb project. Leo and his brother Cardinal Giulio had future hope for the posterity of the family legacy. Michelangelo’s selection to create the tombs was due to his long-standing relationship with the Medici family, especially with most of the individuals either being celebrated or sponsoring the work.

“We must assume that Michelangelo had been hired to execute the final or third plank in Cosimio’s overall plan: to build the New Sacristy and to provide the appropriate monument for the generations that followed him, that of Lorenzo and of Giuliano, Cosimo’s grandson’s, and those of their sons and grandsons. Six generations, which by usual count constitute two hundred years.” [115]

Michelangelo had provided for a tomb for four persons to be erected in the middle of the chapel space, and was to be a free-standing monument. Cardinal Giulio de Medici gave Michelangelo a large amount of creative freedom for the project, saying: “we will agree with whatever you think appropriate.” But there would be concerns that the centralized tomb conceived by Michelangelo did lend itself to concern over whether or not it would fit in the space available. but “Evidently the idea of a centralized multiple tomb gave way to the placement of the tombs on the walls of the chapel, two sets of double tombs, located on facing lateral walls of the chapel.” [116]

“There were many unavoidable interruptions caused by the political situation and the dramatic events affecting Florence and the whole of Italy at the time, which directly involved his patrons’ family.” The major events were the Sack of Rome , the second banishment of the Medici from Florence, and the siege of Florence, by the Imperial Army. [117] One of the more important interruptions was the death of Pope Leo X 1523, where work was canceled until the new Pope, Clement VII, also a Medici, took power in Rome. [118] Clement would again authorize Michelangelo to work on the tomb project but would add the additional project of creating the Laurentian Library staircase and internal structures. [119]

The figures that accompany the tombs in the New Sacristy are “symbolic figures that have a universal significance. They represent the times of day and time itself, which dominates all human activity.” The underlying concept was that Time dominates human life, and the figures symbolize the relationship between man and time. The figures which symbolize these concepts of time are Dawn and Dusk and Night and Day and where created between the years of 1524 and 1531.

To accompany the statues symbolizing time, Michelangelo also created sculptures of the two Medici family member entombed in the New Sacristy, Giuliano de Medici and Lorenzo de Medici . Giuliano is portrayed seated on a stool covered with drapery in the manner of a victorious Roman general sitting in his triumphal chariot. He is wearing Roman armor…he is seen in a pose of a leader ready to assume command, and represents a man of action. While Lorenzo – is wearing armor of a victorious roman general and is seated on a ceremonial chair in a similar fashion. [120] When asked to why Michelangelo did not sculpt the statues in the likeness of the Medici depicted he said:

“Who will know what they looked like in a thousand years time?” This was a characteristic retort of Michelangelo, which might have meant he had done the Medici a favor by giving posterity such an ideal vision of them, but behind it lay the simple fact that Michelangelo disliked portraiture.” [121]

The Medici Chapels are an homage to one of the most influential families in the patronage of the arts and the Italian Renaissance. The New Sacristy, is a celebration of the Dynasty that will always be remembered as Florence’s ruling family during one of the most fruitful artistic time periods in history. Whatever had been personally executed for the project by Michelangelo himself, the conceptual notions he may have contemplated were essentially frozen after September 1534 when he left Florence for Rome, never to return. [122]

Michelangelo’s efforts on the Laurentian Library were created intermittently as he worked on the Medici tomb project. The Library was meant to be in the church of San Lorenzo to house the Medici collection of books and manuscripts, but would not be finished by Michelangelo. The staircase of the library was designed by Michelangelo and executed to his specifications. When asked by Vasari about the stairs he said:

“I recall a certain staircase, as it were in a dream, but I do not think it is exactly what I thought of then, because it is a clumsy affair.” When Vasari asked about when it would be finished and for details he said that “he made a clay model and sent it of to Florence in a box to be built.” [123]

The staircase would be unparalleled to the time period, “Aiming in true High Renaissance fashion for gravity and grandeur, he employed columns, arches, domes, pilasters, cornices and all other features that Renaissance artists had taken over from ancient Rome.” [124]

From the years 1521 to 1534, Michelangelo would work on the Medici tombs and the Laurentian Library, along with the tomb of Pope Julius II, spending his time spread between Florence and Rome. [125] During this time “Michelangelo worked slowly because he was affected by a feeling of creative fatigue, a sign of the immense mental and physical effort needed to release the inner, perfect idea and transform it into an image.” [126] In 1534 Michelangelo leaves for Rome never to return to Florence.

Although all of the individual statues are to some extent unfinished, the two tombs remain coherent units, and so too does the total concept of the chapel. [127] In 1534 Michelangelo receives the commission to paint the Last Judgment and works on the tomb of Julius. His assistants are left to finish the staircase of the Laurentian Library and the Medici chapels are left unfinished. [128]

“A good painting is nothing other than a shadow of the divine perfection and emulation of his painting, a music and a melody that only a noble spirit can perceive, and that only with great effort.” -From Francisco de Hollanda in conversation with Michelangelo [129]

In 1534 Michelangelo left Florence for the last time to spend the rest of his personal and professional life in Rome. Again Michelangelo would be brought into the service of the Pope and the Holy Roman Church. For his first commission and undoubtedly one of the most important of his later works, Michelangelo would be commissioned by Pope Clement VII, sometime between the fall of 1533 and the spring of 1534 to paint the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, with the depiction of the Last Judgment as described in Revelation. [130]

The death of Clement VII in 1534, only two days after Michelangelo arrived in Rome, put the project on hold for a short time. But with the coronation of the new Farnese Pope Paul III , would reinstate the project because of the strong desire of the Popes to leave an artistic legacy to the church. During the period of time Michelangelo was also engaged in constant renegotiation with the heirs of Pope Julius II to finish the Tomb he had started so many years before. But Pope Paul III would insist that Michelangelo work on the Sistine Chapel wall putting of the heirs of the previous Pope. [131]

It is said that Pope Paul III a Farnese, had waited 30 years to have Michelangelo in his service. He like his predecessors Leo X and Clement VII told Michelangelo that he was to complete the projects for his papacy and ignore the work on the tomb of Julius II. It was difficult for Michelangelo the constant guilt over the scaled down Tomb would again be affected by the Popes demands on the artist, but the reverence toward Paul III would be rewarded with greatly. Michelangelo was rewarded by taking the Last Judgment by being named “Chief Architect, Sculptor, Painter, to the Vatican Palace”- an “unprecedented title that emphasized his uniqueness and bound him to the papacy.” [132]

The Last Judgment was painted during a very turbulent time in the history of the Catholic Church. The church had been fighting the effects of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and trying to regain its authority with the Counter or Catholic Reformation . [133]

“The fresco was to be a huge painting that draws the worshiper’s eye…as he approaches the altar “overwhelms him with a tumultuous, fearful vision of judgment. It is a painting intended to bring men to their knees.” [134]

After preliminary work Michelangelo waited to start until the freezing weather ended, but as early as 1537, Paul III was impatient with the progress. When he finally started, Michelangelo worked from the top down to the bottom, where the altar for the chapel sits. Michelangelo was a deeply spiritual man and his own beliefs were evident in his work on the Last Judgment. Bull writes: “Michelangelo’s powerful interpretation of the Day of Judgment and the resurrection of the dead attested to his belief in the importance of faith and the power of the divine will.” [135]

The depiction of the human body in its purest form is something we see over and over again in Michelangelo’s work, and many assert that the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, are divine examples of this talent. It is Condivi that points out:

“In this work Michelangelo expressed all that the art of painting can do with the human figure, leaving out no attitude or gesture whatever…and apart from the sublime composition of the narrative, we see represented here all that nature can do with the human body.” [136]

From the beginning the fresco was as demanding as the ceiling. It required the destruction of frescoes by Perugino and others, as well as two of Michelangelo’s own lunettes for the ceiling; the blocking up of two windows, the rebuilding of the entire wall, the erection of the scaffold, and six years of labor. [137] The preparatory work for the fresco took two years, begun in 1534, but not begun until 1536. After preliminary work Michelangelo waited to start until the freezing weather ended, but as early as 1537, Paul III was impatient with the progress. [138]

Michelangelo, like the majority of his other works, panted the Last Judgment entirely by himself. The only help he received was from an ordinary color grinder. The upper portion was completed in 1540 and the rest finished a year later.

The Fresco is arranged in three zones. The top is the kingdom of heaven, with Christ as the judge of the world enthroned and with the Virgin next to him. Along with him in the first zone are the Prophets, Apostles, Patriarchs, Martyrs, Hosts of angels, The Passion of Christ, and the Cross. In the Middle zone is the realm of those who have been judged. On the left ascend the saved and on the right descend the damned, while in the center the angels of the Lord blow their trumpets. The lowest zone is the realm of the demons, the Resurrection of the dead and the arrival in Hell. The lowest portion is right above the altar. [139]

Condivi describes the some detail of the work:

“In the central part of the air, near the earth, are the seven angels described by St. John in the Apocalypse, who with trumpets at their lips summon the dead to judgment from the four corners of the earth.” [140]

One of the most supreme details of despair is “the supreme portrayal of the soul’s despair in the history of art, a man with arms crossed and hand over one eye, already so tormented with a realization of damnation that he makes no attempt to resist the grinning demons who drag him down. He portrays Christ as naked and beardless in the Classical manner, not bearded and robed in his capacity of a judge, yet he radiates wrath. Mary at his side, cannot intercede now that the end of the world has come. [141]

Michelangelo was said to say pertaining to the fresco:

“I live in sin, I live dying within myself,” and cried out to God “Oh, send the light, so long foretold for all.” [142]

Pope Paul III was so overcome by the awesomeness of the fresco that he immediately broke into prayer saying:

“Lord charge me not with my sins when Thou shalt come on the Day of Judgment.” [143]

The complete painting was unveiled on October 31, 1541, 29 years after the unveiling of the ceiling paintings. [144] There is no doubt that the Last Judgment coupled with the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are the works of a divine genius, and these works give us a small glimpse into the mind of the painter. “The turbulence and contrarieties of Michelangelo’s own state of mind filled his imagination with innumerable varieties of gesture, form and expression, embodied in hundreds of figures in the void between heaven and hell at the end of time.” [145]

The Last Judgment for Michelangelo would cause some distress among many of the Counter-Reformation, which thought that the use of nudity and the human form were too obscene for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Soon after the unveiling of the fresco the infamous “ Fig-Leaf Campaign ” against any painting seen as profane would affect Michelangelo and his progress. There are two such anecdotal ways in which we see the displeasure of Michelagelo’s use of the naked human form.

One of these is the displeasure of Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of cermonies, who when seeing the upper portion of the fresco, likened it to something that would be seen in a bath house. Michelangelo responds to the papal master with a letter, and in it he says:

“I regret that I cannot avail myself of your ideas, but the painting has already progressed to far…” [146]

Eight years later another attack would come from Pietro Arentino, who accused Michelangelo of being irreverent. He said in agreement with Biagio da Cesena, that “Our souls are benefited little by art, but by piety.” In a comical retort to these criticisms, Michelangelo is said to have depicted both of these men in the Last Judgment, as gruesome martyrs.

The opinions of Michelangelo’s dissenters would eventually take hold, and under the decision of the Council of Trent , Pope Paul IV , Pope Gregory XIII , Michelangelo’s nude figures were censored and painted over. The naked bodies of Michelangelo’s masterpiece would be painted over by his pupil Daniele da Volterra Council of Trent , and consequently, he would become known as the “breeches-maker” as he painted over the naked genitalia of the fresco. [147]

Michelangelo had worked on the Tomb of Pope Julius II for a period of forty years, and carried with him a heavy burden. Over the four decades that Michelangelo carried this burden he made several contracts with the family of Julius II, and each time reduced the size and grandeur of the once heavenly envisioned tomb. This commission is often referred to as the “Tragedy of the Tomb” because Michelangelo though several obstacles was never able to complete the tomb with the care and time it deserved. [148]

Michelangelo had tried in vain for forty years to finish the project he promised to complete but because of his various commissions from the several popes and the Medici he was forced to drag out the project. In a letter from Michelangelo to Master Salvestro da Montauto, he says:

“As you know, I am being kept busy in the service of our lord Pope Paul III to paint his new chapel, and so unable to finish the tomb of Pope Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli…” [149]

According to Condivi the contract of 1542 would be the contract by which the final plans would be made for the tomb and would be the closest design to that which we see today. Although the sculptures follow the 1542 contract the architectural design, which was installed to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in 1545, is from the third contract of 1532. [150]

Several years before the tomb was finally installed into the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Michelangelo carved a figure of the Moses and several captives or slaves. But because the captives no longer fit into the niches on either side of the Moses figure to be placed in the scaled down version of the tomb, Michelangelo proposed the figures of the contemplative life (Rachel) and the active life (Leah).

Vasari points out that with the need for new sculptures to be placed in the niches on either side of the Moses, that Michelangelo: “executed the statues in less than a year.”The tomb would finally be placed in the church in 1545, and although it may seem a failure on the part of Michelangelo, the Moses is considered to be one his his greatest works, copied by artists even today. [151]

“What eternal building is there in this city that I have not yet plundered and carried off, without wagons or ships, upon flimsy leaves.” -Michelangelo to Vittoria Colonna, 1545 [152]

The major Roman projects of Michelangleo include: St. Peter’s Basilica, Palazzo Farnese , San Giovanni dei Fiorentini , the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore , Porta Pia and Santa Maria degli Angeli . The remodeling of Saint Peter’s and the Capitoline Hill, the civic center of Rome, being two of the most important works in the eternal city.

Michelangelo, being named “Chief Architect, Sculptor, Painter, to the Vatican Palace,” was commissioned in 1537 to reorganize the Capitoline Hill. This commission came during his work on the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel, but Michelangelo accepted the task. pope wanted to transform the ancient hill, which had once been the site of the Roman Empire’s spiritual capitol, the greatest temple to Jupiter, into a symbol of the power of the new Rome of the Popes.

Michelangelo had to incorporate two buildings into his new design, the medieval Palazzo dei Senatori and the 15th century Palazzo dei Conservatori. Michelangelo used his penchant for the human body in his architectural design and used the form for the design of the Campidoglio. He organized the set of buildings in a symmetrical composition around a central axis. In Michelangelo’s own words he says:

“the members of architecture resemble the members of man. Whoever neither has been nor is master at figures, and especially at anatomy, cannot really understand architecture.”

Michelangelo decided that he needed a new building directly across from the Palazzo dei Senatori to balance the civic unit. He would also re-design the façade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. To embellish the Palazzo Senatori, Michelangelo added a double flight of steps to the entrance and updated the façade, with the elements used in the other two buildings.

The embellishment in the Piazza is something Michelangelo used to his architectural advantage. “Michelangelo created an oval base for the statue of Marcus Aurelius that was to be used as the focal point of the Piazza and surrounding structures. This was a noteworthy choice by Michelangelo as the oval was seen by Renaissance artists as an unstable geometric figure and was shunned, but Michelangelo thought that with the trapezoidal shape that the oval would be best to keep the geometric integrity.” [153]

To finish out the piazza and give it a cohesive feeling, Michelangelo gives the pavement a radiating, star like design as though to dramatize the symbolic meaning of the piazza as the axis of the Roman world. [154]

The Basilica of St. Peter’s was before Michelangelo’s great honor, it belonged to the architect Antonio da San Gallo. But when San Gallo died the Pope asked Michelangelo to take the project and to make the changes he saw fit. According to Condivi, Michelangelo initially told the Pope that he did not want the commission, but the Pope commanded him to take the project, and Michelangelo obliged the Pope.

Once he had decided to take the project, Condivi says that:

“Since Michelangelo had accepted this charge, he made a new model, both because certain elements of the old one did not satisfy him in many respects and because it was such an undertaking that one could expect to see the last day of the world sooner than see St. Peter’s finished.” [155]

The project of St. Peter’s was different for Michelangelo in the sense that he had many people involved and invested in the project as it had been going on for several years and had many contributors before him. The two primary contributors were Bramante and San Gallo.

According to Vasari:

“Michelangelo used to say publicly that San Gallo …had on the exterior too many ranges of columns one above another, and that it was possible to execute it with more majesty, grandeur, and facility, great beauty and convenience, and better ordered design.” [156]

Like Bramante, Michelangelo saw the church as as a compact centrally planned church, essentially with a symmetrical layout. [157] The superiority of Bramante’s design over San Gallo, included: A Greek cross surmounted by a vast central dome. Because of the changes that Michelangelo intended to make to the design of the Basilica he drew much criticism from the San Gallists. The supporters of the former architect claimed that Michelangelo’s design did not allow for light to come into the church from the side aspes. Michelangelo’s response to the Pope, in response to this claim according to Vasari was: “that there would be windows in the vaulting of the aspes.”

“You never told us anything about that,” said the Cardinal. Michelangelo responded: “I am not obliged to tell your Lordship or anyone else what I do or intend to do. Your business is to provide the money and to see that it is not stolen. The building is my affair.” [158]

Michelangelo created a wooden model for St. Peter’s but it was unfinished and he left little drawings or plans because he expected to live long enough to see his plans come to fruition, so that no one could ruin his ideas for the church. The Basilica of St. Peter’s was for Michelangelo “a supreme spiritual challenge, which was to be nothing less than a symbol of the Kingdom of Christianity and of the papacy’s temporal and spiritual power.

Michelangelo said that he thought of architecture “in terms of the human organism-not of arms and legs and separate members, but of the living form-that he was able to bring to his structures a unique sense of organic unity and true functionalism.” He approached this project with a holy zeal and disregard for obstacles. [159] Michelangelo approached the building of St. Peter’s as he did any other commission, with the respect and admiration of those artists that came before him but with his own artistic and spiritual interpretations. According to Tolnay:

“The antique aspect of St. Peter’s is not so much the external order, but the substance of the building’s plastic body and it’s colossal dimensions. He applied the order of antique pilasters to the outside of his edifices not as a symbol of supports and weights, but as bands binding the masses. The aspes of St. Peter’s recall those of medieval buildings in which the classical tradition survives in the masses.” [160]

The Basilica of St. Peter’s would not be finished before Michelangelo’s death. When he dies only the drum-the base on which the dome would rest- was completed. [161]

“I have reached the twenty-fourth hour of my day, and…no project arises in my brain which has hath not the figure of death graven upon it.” -Michelangelo in a letter to Giorgio Vasari [162]

The Deposition , often referred to as the the Florentine Pieta , was a sculpture in which Michelangelo intended for his own tomb. From the late 1540’s Michelangelo was working on the deposition for his own tomb, but either became dissatisfy with it or discovered a flaw in the marble. He smashed the sculpture in anger but later an assistant was allowed to patch it up. [163]

The composition is a development of the Pieta drawn for Vittoria Colonna and also inspired by certain Quattrocento Pietas. The dead body is supported in a vertical position in Michelangelo’s statue: The Virgin and Mary Magdelene to the right and left, and in the center behind Christ is Nicodemus . [164] Michelangelo gave the cowled face of Nicodemus features reminiscent of his own, relaxed with compassion for the dead Christ. The self-portrait seems to be Michelangelo’s attempt at “an old man’s intense yearning for oneness with God.” [165]

For this work Michelangelo tried in his later years to “return to the elemental harmony and intimacy of his first pieta.” His work in the last years was an attempt to become one with God and to secure his place in heaven. “The sheer physicality of this sculpture defies the transcendence of a non-symbolic art geared towards the subjective experience of the Christian mystery.”

In a poem written by Michelangelo, he writes during this time:

In such slavery, and with so much boredom, and with false conceptions and great peril to my soul, to be here sculpting divine things. [166]

In a quote by French Traveler Blaise de Vigenere, it is easy to see the virility of Michelangelo even in his old age. He writes:

“I saw Michelangelo at work. He had passes his sixtieth year and although he was not very strong, yet in a quarter of an hour he caused more splinters to fall from a very hard block of marble than three young masons in three or four times as long…And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down fragments three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point marked, that if only a little more marble had fallen, he would have risked spoiling the whole work.” [167]

See photos and read more about Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta .

Michelangelo began the first version of the Rondanini Pieta around 1552-1553; the second 1555, after the mutilation of the Pieta. And the third version dates from shortly before his death in 1564.

“Belonging to the first version, rejected by Michelangelo himself, are the polished legs of Christ, his right hip, and a fragment of his polished right arm which is now detached form the body, and finally a rough-hewn piece of the Virgin’s face turned toward the right, in which one can recognize the forehead, eyes, nose, and veil.”(Tolnay 217-218)

In the first version the legs of the Christ and the free right arm are from the first version sculpted by Michelangelo.(Goldscheider, 22) The elongated rough-hewn figures of Mary and Jesus create an extraordinary impression; it is hard to believe that the work would have gained emotional impact by being finished.(Harris, 56) “The tall thin, dematerialized figures of Christ and Mary, carved in part from what was the single body of the Virgin in an earlier version, are literlly blended by love into each other.”(Coughlan, 192)

There is controversy over whether or not these sculptures can be called finished, but his late style and religious feelings toward death may have been why he left the rough surfaces and vaugue outline of the figures.(Coughlan 192) “The elongated rough-hewn figures of Mary and Jesus create an extraordinary impression; it is hard to believe that the work would have gained emotional impact by being finished.” In this sculpture the long sorrowful shapes of Mary and Christ, we can easily see this being a work that would be aesthetically pleasing in the modern era. (Harris, 76-78)

Late in the completion of the work “the base was partly cut away in front, destroying the toes on Christ’s right foot, and the inscription, ‘SS Pieta di Michelangelo Buonarota’ was carved on it.”(Tolnay, 218) On Feb 12, 1564 six days before his death, Michelangelo worked on this Pieta all day as described by Daniele Volterra.(Goldscheider, 22)

On his death bed, Michelangelo said:

“I regret that I have not done enough for the salvation of my soul and that I am dying just as I am beginning to learn the alphabet of my profession.” (Coughlan, 192)

See photos and read more about Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta .

“If in thy name I conceived any image, it is not without the accompaniment of death, whereat art and genius vanish” -Michelangelo(Clements, 178)

Michelangelo Buonarroti died on February 18, 1564 in Rome, only six days after he had worked all day in his studio. In Condivi’s biography he simply ends by saying:

“I will prove to the world how great [were] his powers of invention and how many beautiful ideas have sprung from that divine spirit. And with this, I make an end”(Condivi, 109)

It was always Michelangelo’s wish to be buried in his native Tuscany, as it was traditional for Italians to want to return to the place of their birth to be buried in their final resting place. But Michelangelo having spent many years in Rome in the service of the Popes, was considered Roman by many of his contemporaries.

Michelangelo beloved artists of the papacy, “was buried in Rome in The church of the Holy Apostles in Rome, and then his body was stolen and smuggled out of the city by some Florentine merchants, so that it could be re-buried in his native soil, in the Church of Santa Croce.”(Harris, 78)

There was a council created in Florence made up of artists, orators, and event planners to prepare for the funeral of Michelangelo. The service was held in the Church of San Lorenzo, which Michelangelo had created the Medici Tombs, the Lauretian Library, and served the Medici faithfully. During the council it was decided that Giorgio Vasari would create the tomb for Michelangelo, for his resting place in the church of Santa Croce. It was also decided that Benedetto Varchi would give the eulogy at the funeral. The funeral would be held at the Church of San Lorenzo then a processional would take the body through the city street of Florence to the Church of Santa Croce, where Michelangelo would be buried. (Wittkower, intro)

Shortly after Michelangelo’s death the Florentine Academy created a book of letters and poems from contemporaries of Michelangelo as rememberence of his life and accomplishments, called: The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on His Death in 1564. In the book there was an out-pouring of respect and admiration for the genius artists from some of the most respected artists, politicians, and clergy of the time.

Mario Bazanti writes for the book:

“…Here lie a sculptor, painter, poet, and a master builder, Buonarroti alone was all these. But if you doubt this miracle-his pictures, marbles, buildings, and his Tuscan poems vouch for his truth.”

Bartolommeo Panciatichi writes:

“Now you are the lifeless captive of those marbles which once received their life from you. No, I’m wrong! They’ll always be your captives.”(Wittkower, 81)

In one of Michelangelo’s final poems, he confronts death and in some ways accepts and welcomes it.

Of death I am sure, but not of the time; Life is short and little remains before me; My senses are deleted, however I am bound for Heaven, and she prays that I go. (Clements,179)

• Bull, George. Michelangelo: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Pp.xvii.
• Harris, Nathaniel. The Art of Michelangelo. New York: Excalibur Books, 1983. p.6.
• Harris, P. 6.
• Brandes, Georg. Michelangelo: His Life, His Times, His Era. New York: Frederick Ungar Press, 1963. Pg. 4-5.
• Illetschko,Georgia. I,Michelangelo. Munich, Berlin, London, New York:Prestel, 2004.
• Spike, John T. Young Michelangelo. New York: The Vendome Press, 2010. Pg. 73.
• Spike, pg 17.
• Bull, pg 9.
• Goldscheider, Ludwig. Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculptures, and Architecture. London:Phaidon, 1975. pg. 5.
• Spike, pg 24.
• Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. Louisiana State University Press:Baton Rouge, 1976. pg. 9.
• Vasari, Giorgio, Translation by Du C. de Vere, Gaston. Lives of the Great Masters. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986. pg.208.
• Bull, pg 13.
• Goldscheider, Ludwig, pg.5.
• Coughlan, Robert. The World of Michelangelo: 1475-1564. New York: Time-Life Books, 1972. pg 15.
• Bull, pg 5.
• Spike, pg 34.
• Brandes, pg 9.
• Goldsheider,5.
• Harris, 17.
• Vasari,210.
• Condivi, 10.
• De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975.
• Vasari, 221.
• Golshieder,5.
• Spike, 86-87.
• Goldscheider, 5.
• Brandes, 32.
• Harris, 22.
• Murray, Linda. Michelangelo. Thames and Hudson: London, 1980. pg 32.
• Spike, 97-98.
• Brandes, 145.
• Bull, 37-38.
• Translated by Gilbert, Creighton. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo. New Jersey, Princeton University Press: 1980. pg. xxxi).
• Coughlan,73.
• Spike, 107.
• Brandes, 147.
• Spike, 109-110.
• Spike, 118.
• Condivi,24-25.
• Spike, 121.
• Brandes, 150.
• Illetschko, intro.
• Harris, 26.
• Coughlan,90.
• Kleiner, Fred S. and Mamiya, Christian J. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: Vol 2, Twelfth Edition Volume II. United States: Wadsworth, 2005, pg 622.
• Condivi, 27.
• Spike, 143.
• Murray, 40.
• Murray, 41-42.
• Summers, David. Editor: William E. Wallace. Life and Early Works of Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English. Vol 1. Garland Publishing: New York and London, 1995. Pg. 311.
• Kleiner and Mamiya, 622
• Illetschko, 136.
• Spike 171-172.
• Condivi, 28.
• Harris, 30.
• Brandes, 194.
• Spike, 197-198.
• Coughlan,109.
• Spike, 200.
• Bull, 68-69.
• Coughlan, 109.
• Goldscheider, 6.
• Illetschko,intro.
• Harris, 41.
• Brandes, 195.
• Condivi, 39.
• Coughlan, 112.
• Kleiner and Mamiya, 624.
• Condivi, 57.
• Tolnay, 24-26.
• Kleiner and Mayima, 626.
• Harris, 42.
• Harris, 43.
• Condivi, 58.
• Kleiner and Mamiya, 626.
• Tolnay, 27-28.
• Coughlan, 113.
• Coughlan,131.
• Kleiner and Mamiya, 623.
• Brandes, 248.
• Janson, H.W. Sixteen Studies: Chapter 14 Study: The Right Arm of Michelangelo’s Moses. Abrams, NC., Publishers: New York. Pp. 289-302. pg 296.
• Goldscheider, 15.
• Coughlan, 132.
• Brandes,89.
• Coughlan, 135.
• Bull, 130-131.
• Harris, 50.
• Coughlan, 136.
• Condivi, 61-62.
• Tolnay, 201.
• Goldschieder, 17.
• Beck, 18-20.
• Beck, 20-22
• Goldschieder, 7.
• Harris, 52.
• Santi, 31-32.
• Harris, 56.
• Coughlan, 148.
• Harris, 57.
• Goldschieder, 15.
• Brandes, 382.
• Goldscheider, 7.
• Harris, 59.
• Kleiner and Mamiya, 634.
• Bull, 289, 295.
• Condivi, 83, 87.
• Coughlan, 127.
• Goldshieder, 20.
• Condivi, 83.
• Coughlan, 27.
• Goldscheider, 20.
• Goldshieder, 19.
• Coughlan, 162.
• Creighton, 266.
• Condivi, 117-18.
• Kliener and Mamiya, 635.
• Coughlan, 169.
• Condivi, 101.
• Vasari, 276.
• Harris, 75.
• Coughlan, 177.
• Coughlan, 176-182.
• Tolnay, 166.
• Coughlan, 192.
• Harris, 74.
• Harris, 77.
• Tolnay, 217.
• Illetschko,57.
• Goldscheider, 22.

Michelangelo

Mar 6, 1475 - feb 18, 1564, artist highlights, slideshow auto-selected from multiple collections, michelangelo from behind – masterworks in a new perspective, zentralinstitut für kunstgeschichte, 7 facts about leonardo da vinci, which renaissance painter are you, in the footsteps of michelangelo, casa buonarroti, where to catch michelangelo around the world, the unlikely figure we have to thank for the renaissance’s greatest masterpieces, the three davids, scan the world, discover this artist, related works from the web, david of michelangelo (1504), www.wikiart.org david, 1501 - 1504 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, the creation of adam, www.wikiart.org sistine chapel ceiling: creation of adam, 1510 - michelangelo ..., la pietà di michelangelo (1499), www.wikiart.org pieta, 1499 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, sistine chapel ceiling (1512), en.wikipedia.org sistine chapel ceiling - wikipedia, the last judgment (1541), www.wikiart.org the last judgement, 1537 - 1541 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, mosè di michelangelo (1515), www.wikiart.org moses, 1513 - 1515 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, madonna of bruges (1504), www.wikiart.org madonna and child, 1501 - 1505 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, rondanini pietà (1564), en.wikipedia.org rondanini pietà - wikipedia, dying slave (1516), www.wikiart.org the dying slave, 1513 - 1515 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, bacchus (1497), www.wikiart.org bacchus, 1497 - michelangelo - wikiart.org, “trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”, more artists, 1,300 items, albrecht dürer, 2,091 items, peter paul rubens, auguste rodin, more art movements, italian renaissance, 2,711 items, renaissance, 14,204 items, high renaissance, more mediums, 27,083 items, 31,646 items, 8,988 items, 16,227 items, 2,699 items, 80,134 items.

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Life of michelangelo buonarroti – biography and works.

one of the geniuses of the Renaissance, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese (Caprese Michelangelo), a village in the upper Val Tiberina today in the province of Arezzo, which at the time was part of the dominions of the Republic of Florence, from Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera and Ludovico, of an ancient Florentine family. Of great moral depth, he was a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of Western art.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born into a family which, for several generations, belonged to a minor Florentine nobility but had lost its patrimony and status by the time of the artist’s birth. His father had only occasional government jobs and, at the time of Michelangelo’s birth, was the administrator of the small village of Caprese. A few months later, however, the family returned to their permanent residence in Florence.

For his family, becoming an artist was a downward social step, and Michelangelo became an apprentice relatively late, at 13. In any case, Michelangelo already, from an early age, had shown an extraordinary propensity for drawing, managing to overcome the resistance of his father, a “religious and good man, and rather of ancient customs” (at this time, in Florence, the painting was still considered a “mechanical” art and unworthy of a young man from a good family): in April 1488, when he was thirteen, he entered Domenico’s workshop as an apprentice Ghirlandaio was the most important painter in Florence at that time (from whom he learned the fresco technique).

The latter was working on the frescoes in the choir of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella: but the first Buonarroti autographs (three pen drawings, datable to 1488-90, copies by Masaccio of the Church of Santa Maria Carmine and by Giotto of the Peruzzi Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Croce) testify that the fact “that the child was not satisfied with the expert painting of Ghirlandaio means neither more nor less the rejection of the subtle and nervous sensibility of the Florentine art of the third generation of the century, the annoyance for that spirit of episodic naturalism and ornamental elegance that characterized it and the need to return to the grandiose and synthetic spirit of the early fifteenth century” (Salvini). After only one year, he left Ghirlandaio’s workshop, having told (his future biographer Condivi) that he had nothing else to learn.

From the year 1490, in which Michelangelo begins to frequent the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent (who, admiring his skills as a sculptor, treats him “no differently than as a son”) up to 1503, there remain no certainly autographed pictorial works: in the two tables with the Madonna and the Deposition of Christ, attributable to 1510 and kept in the National Gallery in London, critics have preferred to see the hand of an unknown artist, perhaps a friend of Michelangelo, who worked under his inspiration and assistance. Within the circle of the “Magnificent,” Michelangelo had access to the Medici art collection, dominated by fragments of ancient Roman sculpture. The bronze sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who looked after the collection, was closest to a master sculptor, but Michelangelo did not follow his approach. However, one of the two marble works that survive the artist’s early years is a variation on the composition of an ancient Roman sarcophagus. Bertoldo had produced a similar one in bronze. This composition is the Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492). The action and power of the figures herald the artist’s later interests, much more so than the Madonna delle Scale (c. 1491), a delicate bas-relief reflecting the recent fashions of Florentine sculptors such as Desiderio da Settignano.

Florence, in this period, was considered the major center of art in existence, capable of producing the best painters and sculptors in Europe, and the competition between artists was stimulating. The city, however, no longer offered large commissions, and important Florentine artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo’s teacher, had moved away to get better opportunities in other cities. The Medici were overthrown in 1494, and even before the end of the political turmoil, Michelangelo had left Florence for Bologna.

In the Emilian city, he was engaged to succeed a recently deceased sculptor and sculpt the last small figures needed to complete a large project in the Basilica of San Domenico, the tomb and sanctuary of San Domenico, the so-called Arca di San Domenico (1494-95 ). The young Michelangelo contributed some small but significant statues: that of San Petronio, of San Procolo, and the angel holding the candlestick on the right. The three marble figures are original and expressive. Building on the imaginative agility of his predecessor, he imposed seriousness on his images with a compactness of form that owes much to classical antiquity and the Florentine tradition from Giotto onwards. His choice of marble as a medium also reflects this emphasis on seriousness. The simplification of the masses accompanying it contrasts with the then-more-usual tendency to make the representations coincide as much as possible with the structure and detail of the bodies of humans. Of course, while these are constant qualities in Michelangelo’s art, they are often temporarily abandoned or modified due to other factors, such as the specific functions of the works or the challenging creations of other artists.

The Bacchus

This was the case with Michelangelo’s first large surviving statue, the Bacchus, produced in Rome in 1496-97 after a brief return to Florence and now in the Bargello Museum. (A recently discovered wooden crucifix, attributed by some scholars to Michelangelo and now housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, has also been proposed as an antecedent of the Bacchus in the drawing by those accrediting it as a work by the artist). The Bacchus is based on ancient Roman nude figures as a starting point but is much more mobile and complex in profile. Conscious instability evokes the Dionysian god of wine, who enjoys himself with extraordinary virtuosity. Made for a garden, it is also unique among Michelangelo’s works in asking for observation from all sides rather than primarily from the front.

The Bacchus immediately led to the commission by the French cardinal Jean de Bilhères, in 1498, of the Pietà, one of the most famous works in the history of art, destined for the Chapel of Santa Petronilla (the chapel of the kings of France) in St. Peter’s Basilica. The name “Pietà” does not refer (as is often assumed) to this specific work but to a common traditional type of devotional image more common in northern Europe, of which it is the most famous example today. Extracted from narrative scenes of the lamentation after Christ’s death, the concentrated sculptural group of the two subjects was designed to evoke the viewer’s repentant prayers for the sins that required Christ’s sacrificial death. The most complex problem for the artist to face was that of extracting two figures from a block of marble, an unusual and very difficult undertaking in all periods. Michelangelo treated the group as a dense and compact mass with an imposing impact. Yet, he underlined the many contrasts present – of male and female, vertical and horizontal, clothed and naked, dead and alive – to clarify the two components. Michelangelo, when he sculpted the Pietà, was only 23 years old.

David of Michelangelo

The commission immediately strengthened the importance of the Florentine artist established by Pietà in 1501 David for the cathedral of Florence. For this gigantic statue, an exceptionally large commission in Florence, Michelangelo reused a block that had been left unfinished some 40 years earlier. The modeling was particularly close to the formulas of classical antiquity, with a simplified geometry suitable for the large scale but with a slight affirmation of organic life in its asymmetry. The majestic sculpture was the first affirmation of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. Although it was originally intended for the buttress of the cathedral, the magnificence of the finished work convinced Michelangelo’s contemporaries to install it in a more prominent location, determined by a commission of leading artists and citizens. They decided that the David would be installed in front of the entrance to the Palazzo dei Priori (now Palazzo Vecchio) as the very symbol of the Florentine Republic.

In the same years (1501-04), Michelangelo produced several Madonnas for private houses, the basis of the work of the artists of the time. These include a statuette, two circular painting-like reliefs suggesting various levels of spatial depth, and the artist’s single easel canvas. While the statue (Madonna and Child) is frozen and motionless, the painting (Holy Family or Tondo Doni) and one of the reliefs (Madonna and Child with the infant Saint John) is full of movement; they show arms and legs of figures intertwined in actions involving movement through time. The shapes bear symbolic references to the future death of Christ, common in images of the Christ Child of the time; they also betray the artist’s fascination with Leonardo’s work. Michelangelo regularly denied that anyone had influenced him, and his statements were generally accepted without fear. But Leonardo’s return to Florence in 1500 after nearly 20 years was exciting for younger artists, and late 20th-century scholars generally agreed that Michelangelo was among the most affected people. Leonardo’s works were the most powerful and lasting external influences to shape his work. He could blend the artist’s ability to show momentary processes with his own to show weight and strength without losing any of these. qualities. The resulting images of massive bodies in vigorous action are those special creations that constitute the bulk of his most admired works.

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Il Tondo Doni

The so-called Doni Tondo, Michelangelo’s first certain painting, dates from the end of 1503. In this table, the not-yet thirty-year-old artist comes to experience and consume what will become his formidable conceptual and formal archetypes. The expanded and elusive substance of Leonardo’s image, which he had known from the cartoon of Sant’Anna exhibited in the city three years earlier, here becomes a decisive contour, a “functional line” (Longhi), defining in space a knot of figures now eminently sculptural, because, as stated by Carlo Giulio Argan, “… the concepts have no relationship with sensory experience”.

The Doni Tondo was destined to profoundly renew the fifteenth-century Florentine tradition of the “tondo”, overcoming the perspective space of Masaccio or Domenico Veneziano and the rhythmic one of Botticelli (think of the Madonna of the pomegranate) in the affirmation of a universal space, “imagining a gigantic humanity that acts, but in collected and tight motions and as if jammed by the mass” (Roberto Longhi).

Central years in Michelangelo’s career

After the success of David in 1504, Michelangelo’s work consisted almost entirely of vast projects. These ambitious tasks attracted the artist and, at the same time, repelled the use of assistants, so most of these projects were impracticable and needed to be completed. Indeed, in the artistic circles of Rome and Florence, it was astounding that Michelangelo had not created his school or assistant workshop. Having many students meant the possibility of performing many works and earning more. Unlike his rival Raphael, the Florentine artist lived at times in hardship, isolated and solitary. But despite this, he was known, recognized, and admired. Not only did he have a closed temperament, but the more demanding work was, the more he enlightened and tormented to solve it and complete it in an infinite and repaid trust in his talent. His immense talent justified all his presumptions.

Battle of Cascina (Battaglia di Cascina)

From the autumn of 1504 to March of the following year, Michelangelo was engaged in a great, though never accomplished, pictorial undertaking: the fresco of the Battle of Cascina for the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, celebrating the Florentine victory in 1364 against the Pisan army commanded by John Hawkwood, the famous Giovanni Acuto (the Italian name was attributed to him by Niccolò Machiavelli). The work was commissioned – as Giorgio Vasari informs – by “Piero Soderini, then Gonfaloniere, for the great virtue, that he saw in Michelagnolo” and went no further than the execution of the “cartoon” (i.e., the life-size drawing to be transposed on the wall before painting it), now lost and known to us through a copy of 1542 by Aristotle da Sangallo, as well as from a series of sketches and drawings by Michelangelo’s hand, which tends “towards the expression of absolute terror and the depiction of an equally absolute and total escape: as it will be in the Deluge, already here the lyrical motif is the total and desperate anxiety of salvation.” (Roberto Salvini).

Buonarroti’s fresco was to form a pair with another just begun by Leonardo da Vinci. Both frescoes depicted the city’s military victories, but each was also meant to be a testament to the much-vaunted special skills of the city’s artists. Leonardo’s project, the Battle of Anghiari, showed galloping horses; Michelangelo’s naked soldiers stop to swim and climb a river to respond to an alarm. Leonardo’s work also survives only in partial preparatory sketches and copies.

In 1505 the artist began work on a series of 12 marble apostles for the cathedral of Florence, of which only one, San Matteo, was even begun. His ecstatic movement shows the full blend of Leonardo’s fluid organic movement with Michelangelo’s monumental power. This is also the first of Michelangelo’s unfinished works that have captivated later observers. The figures of him seem to suggest that they are struggling to get out of the stone. This would imply that their incomplete state was intentional, but no doubt he intended to complete all the statutes. However, he wrote a sonnet about how difficult it is for the sculptor to bring the perfect figure out of the block in which it is potentially present. Thus, even if the works remained unfinished only due to lack of time and other external reasons, their condition nevertheless reflects the artist’s intense sensitivity to the tensions inherent in the creative process.

Pope Julius II’s appeal to Michelangelo to come to Rome ended both Florentine projects, the Battle of Cascina, and the sculptures of the 12 apostles for Florence Cathedral. The pope looked for a tomb for which Michelangelo would sculpt 40 large statues. Recent tombs had been increasingly large, including those of two popes by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Pollaiuolo, those of the Doges of Venice, and one later in construction for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Pope Julius had an ambitious imagination, paralleling that of Michelangelo. However, owing to other projects, such as the new building of St. Peter’s and his military campaigns, he soon became disturbed by the cost. Michelangelo believed that Bramante, the equally prestigious architect of St. Peter’s, had influenced the pope to cut off his funds. He left Rome, but the pope pressured the city authorities in Florence to send him back. He was set to work on a colossal bronze statue of the pope in the newly conquered Bolognese city (which the citizens pulled down shortly after when they drove out the papal army) and then on the less expensive project of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12).

Sistine Chapel ceiling

Between March 1505 and the end of 1507, the “tragedy of the burial” unfolds the story of the tormented commission of the funeral monument of Julius II, destined to mark and darken the artist’s soul deeply. But in May 1508, he signed in Rome, with Julius II himself, the contract for the decoration of the vault of the Sistine Chapel: expanding the iconographic program foreseen by the pontiff (“… he gave me a new commission that I should do on the vault what I wanted”, he would later write in a letter) Michelangelo completed the fresco in four years of solitary and relentless work.

In the shape of the vault, he inserts the majestic figures of the Prophets and of the Sibyls, of the Ignudi and the Stories of Genesis, giving life, in the spandrels, in the ribs and the lunettes with the Miraculous salvations of Israel to an epic representation of Humanity “ante legem” and “sub lege.” The whole immense, exciting structure, which has become the “symbol” of Renaissance art, lives on the Neoplatonic identity between Good and Beautiful and reflects, in its speculative substratum, the concept of divine radiance in the human soul through the different degrees of knowledge (the Prophets and the Sibyls) and of the advent of Christian Revelation as the final goal of man’s spiritual history.

Michelangelo’s work represents, according to Longhi, “… the last great expression of drawing as a functional line vibrating in masses of collected plasticity”: of this expression, the Sistine vault constitutes the highest outcome before the Last Judgment, frescoed between 1536 and 1541 on the wall of the altar. This second, shocking representation goes beyond the limits and spatial measure as well as the traditional iconography of the theme: in it, “…Michelangelo cannot paint the blessed who ascend to heaven flying without weight but only bodies who scale the sky propping themselves up with difficulty on the solid clouds like rocks; and more willingly than blessed he paints the damned between the grips of the devils” (Longhi). In a vision as lofty as it is desperate, the Judgment overwhelms, with the formal ideals, even the moral and intellectual certainties of the “Renaissance,” marking its dramatic conclusion and at the same time preparing, beyond any doctrinal guarantee, the ground for modern consciousness.

Thus the two frescoes, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, executed between 1542 and 1550 in the Pauline Chapel, live “in an airless space, full of an arid and almost sandy light (…), represent, in short, the moment of Michelangelo’s religious lyric, that is, the moment in which poetry, whether verbal or visual, appears to him as a spiritual exercise, a real ascetic practice. Shortly, Giordano Bruno will call “contractio animi” (Argan).

Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist of his era (and what an era! The Renaissance) and has since entered the Olympus of the greatest artists of all time. A side effect of Michelangelo’s fame in his lifetime was that his career was more widely documented than any artist of the time or earlier. He was the first Western artist whose biography was published while still alive. There were two rival biographies. The first was the final chapter in the Life of Artists series (1550) by another great Renaissance genius, the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari. It was the only chapter on a living artist and explicitly presented Michelangelo’s works as the culminating perfection of art, surpassing the efforts of all who preceded him. Despite such praise, Michelangelo was not entirely satisfied and had his assistant Ascanio Condivi write a separate short book (1553); probably based on comments made by the artist himself, this account shows him as he intended to appear.

After Michelangelo’s death, Vasari, in a second edition (1568), changed and improved his biography. While scholars have often preferred Condivi’s authority, Vasari’s lively writing, the importance of his book, and its frequent reprinting in many languages have made it the more usual basis for popular ideas about Michelangelo and others. Renaissance artists. Michelangelo’s fame also led to preserving countless memorabilia, including hundreds of letters, sketches, and poems – again more than any other contemporary.

The last twenty years of Michelangelo’s life are directed above all to architecture and sculptural problems: some drawings from the extreme years have the Crucifixion and Deposition as their themes; in them, every search for finitude or formal beauty is resigned or subordinated to meditation on the sacrifice of Christ as a catharsis and redemption of man’s drama. Michelangelo Buonarroti died in Rome on February 18, 1564, after having “… a thousand times asked God for that ale / with which our mortal / career intellect rises to heaven”: his surly, sometimes experimental research and his fifty-year mastery will constitute for entire generations of artists, up to the threshold of the 18th century, a legacy as problematic as it is inescapable.

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Michelangelo.

• Occupation: Sculptor, Painter, Architect
• Born: March 6, 1475 in Caprese, Italy
• Died: February 18, 1564 in Rome, Italy
• Famous works: David , the Pieta , and paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
• Style/Period: Renaissance

• His full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.
• When he was seventeen he was hit on the nose by fellow artist Pietro Torrigiano in an argument. His nose was severely broken as can be seen in the portraits we have of Michelangelo.
• He thought that the painter Rafael convinced the Pope to have him paint the Sistine Chapel out of jealousy over his sculptures.
• He also painted The Last Judgment , a famous painting on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.
• No two of the 300 people painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel look alike.
• He was also a poet who wrote over 300 poems.
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About Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian, Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of Saint Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.

In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany. (Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo). For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence, but his father, Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarroti di Simoni, failed to maintain the bank's financial status, and held occasional government positions. At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa; this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it. Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where Michelangelo was raised. At later times, during the prolonged illness and after the death of his mother in 1481 when he was just six years old, Michelangelo lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. Giorgio Vasari quotes Michelangelo as saying, "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."

Michelangelo's father sent him to study grammar with the Humanist Francesco da Urbino in Florence as a young boy. The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters. At thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. When Michelangelo was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time. When in 1489 Lorenzo de' Medici, 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 Humanist academy which the Medici had founded along Neo Platonic lines. Michelangelo studied sculpture under Bertoldo di Giovanni. At the academy, both Michelangelo's outlook and his art were subject to the influence of many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano. At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. While both were apprenticed to Bertoldo di Giovanni, Pietro Torrigiano struck the 17 year old on the nose, and thus caused that disfigurement which is so conspicuous in all the portraits of Michelangelo.

Early adulthood

Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances. Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a wooden crucifix (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought a block of marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime circa 18th century. On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici commissioned a snow statue, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici.

In the same year, the Medici were expelled from Florence as the result of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. In Bologna, he was commissioned to finish the carving of the last small figures of the Shrine of St. Dominic, in the church dedicated to that saint. Towards the end 1494, the political situation in Florence was calmer. The city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici. During the half year he spent in Florence he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping Cupid. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome…pass [it off as] an ancient work and…sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.

Michelangelo arrived in Rome 25 June 1496 at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god, Bacchus. However, upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden.

In November of 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà and the contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. The contemporary opinion about this work — "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture" — was summarized by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh."

In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. Here, according to the legend, he fell in love with Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara and a poet.[citation needed] His house was demolished in 1874, and the remaining architectural elements saved by the new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction of Michelangelo's house can be seen on the Gianicolo hill. It is also during this period that skeptics allege Michelangelo executed the sculpture Laocoön and His Sons which resides in the Vatican.

Statue of David

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499–1501. Things were changing in the republic after the fall of anti-Renaissance Priest and leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola (executed in 1498) and the rise of the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini. He was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the Statue of David in 1504. This masterwork, created out of a marble block from the quarries at Carrara that had already been worked on by an earlier hand, definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination.

Also during this period, Michelangelo painted the Holy Family and St John, also known as the Doni Tondo or the Holy Family of the Tribune: it was commissioned for the marriage of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi and in the 17th century hung in the room known as the Tribune in the Uffizi. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London.

Sistine Chapel ceiling

In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II. He was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. Under the patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Because of these interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years. The tomb, of which the central feature is Michelangelo's statue of Moses , was never finished to Michelangelo's satisfaction. It is located in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

During the same period, Michelangelo took the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Michelangelo's account, Bramante and Raphael convinced the Pope to commission Michelangelo in a medium not familiar to the artist. This was done in order that he, Michelangelo, would suffer unfavorable comparisons with his rival Raphael, who at the time was at the peak of his own artistry as the primo fresco painter. However, this story is discounted by modern historians on the grounds of contemporary evidence, and may merely have been a reflection of the artist's own perspective.

Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the 12 Apostles against a starry sky, but lobbied for a different and more complex scheme, representing creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets and Genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The composition eventually contained over 300 figures and had at its center nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's Creation of the Earth; God's Creation of Humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of Humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus. They are seven prophets of Israel and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world.

Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are the Creation of Adam , Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, the Prophet Isaiah and the Cumaean Sibyl. Around the windows are painted the ancestors of Christ.

Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel www.vatican.va. This virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel is incredible. Apparently done by Villanova at the request of the Vatican.

To view every part of this Michelangelo masterpiece, just click and drag the arrowin the direction you wish to see. In the lower left, click on the plus (+) to move closer, on the minus (-) to move away. Choir is thrown in free.

Under Medici Popes in Florence

In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the façade of the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years he spent in creating drawings and models for the facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project, were among the most frustrating in his career, as work was abruptly canceled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a facade to this day.

Apparently not the least embarrassed by this turnabout, the Medici later came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the basilica of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized.

In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530 and the Medici were restored to power. Completely out of sympathy with the repressive reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel.

Last works in Rome

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Clement VII, who died shortly after assigning the commission. Paul III was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project. Michelangelo labored on the project from 1534 to October 1541. The work is massive and spans the entire wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgment is a depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse; where the souls of humanity rise and are assigned to their various fates, as judged by Christ, surrounded by the Saints.

Once completed, the depictions of nakedness in the papal chapel was considered obscene and sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. After Michelangelo's death, it was decided to obscure the genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to cover with perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered the complex of bodies. When the work was restored in 1993, the conservators chose not to remove all the perizomas of Daniele, leaving some of them as a historical document, and because some of Michelangelo’s work was previously scraped away by the touch-up artist's application of “decency” to the masterpiece. A faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, can be seen at the Capodimonte Museum of Naples. Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel .

Michelangelo designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, although it was unfinished when he died.

Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" ("inventor of obscenities", in the original Italian language referring to "pork things"). The infamous "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter-Reformation, aiming to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures, started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the marble statue of Cristo della Minerva (church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) was covered by added drapery, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium) remained covered for several decades. Also, the plaster copy of the David in the Cast Courts (Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, has a fig leaf in a box at the back of the statue. It was there to be placed over the statue's genitals so that they would not upset visiting female royalty.

In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. As St. Peter's was progressing there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable. Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 88 (three weeks before his 89th birthday). His body was brought back from Rome for interment at the Basilica di Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

Architectural work

Michelangelo worked on many projects that had been started by other men, most notably in his work at St Peter's Basilica , Rome. The Campidoglio , designed by Michelangelo during the same period, rationalized the structures and spaces of Rome's Capitoline Hill. Its shape, more a rhomboid than a square, was intended to counteract the effects of perspective. The major Florentine architectural projects by Michelangelo are the unexecuted façade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence and the Medici Chapel (Capella Medicea) and Laurentian Library there, and the fortifications of Florence. The major Roman projects are St. Peter's, Palazzo Farnese , San Giovanni dei Fiorentini , the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Porta Pia and Santa Maria degli Angeli.

Laurentian Library

Around 1530 Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

Medici Chapel

Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel and in fact used his own discretion to create its composition. The Medici Chapel has monuments in it dedicated to certain members of the Medici family. Michelangelo never finished the project, so his pupils later completed it. Lorenzo the Magnificent was buried at the entrance wall of the Medici Chapel. Sculptures of the "Madonna and Child" and the Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian were set over his burial. The "Madonna and child" was Michelangelo's own work. The concealed corridor with wall drawings of Michelangelo under the New Sacristy discovered in 1976. Personality

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly dissatisfied with himself, saw art as originating from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are forceful and dynamic, each in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor was to free the forms that were already inside the stone. He believed that every stone had a sculpture within it, and that the work of sculpting was simply a matter of chipping away all that was not a part of the statue.

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was greatly admired in his own time. Another Lorenzo de Medici wanted to use Michelangelo to make some money. He had Michelangelo sculpt a Cupid that looked worn and old. Lorenzo paid Michelangelo 30 ducats, but sold the Cupid for 200 ducats. Cardinal Raffaele Riario became suspicious and sent someone to investigate. The man had Michelangelo do a sketch for him of a Cupid, and then told Michelangelo that while he received 30 ducats for his Cupid, Lorenzo had passed the Cupid off for an antique and sold it for 200 ducats. Michelangelo then confessed that he had done the Cupid, but had no idea that he had been cheated. After the truth was revealed, the Cardinal later took this as proof of his skill and commissioned his Bacchus. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the Moses (San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to me?"

Personality

In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious. He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots." These habits may have made him unpopular. His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him." He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person. He had a reputation for being bizzarro e fantastico because he "withdrew himself from the company of men."

While clearly having a keen appreciation for the nude form resurgent in the Renaissance, fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of male beauty which seems to have particularly attracted him both aesthetically and emotionally. In part, this was an expression of the Renaissance idealization of masculinity. But in Michelangelo's art there is clearly a sensual response to this aesthetic.

The sculptor's expressions of love have been characterized as both Neoplatonic and openly homoerotic; recent scholarship seeks an interpretation which respects both readings, yet is wary of drawing absolute conclusions.[citation needed] One example of the conundrum is Cecchino dei Bracci, whose death, only a year after their meeting in 1543, inspired the writing of forty eight funeral epigrams, which by some accounts allude to a relationship that was not only romantic but physical as well:

According to others, they represent an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities (Indeed, it must be remembered that professions of love in 16th century Italy were given a far wider application than now).

The greatest written expression of his love was given to Tommaso dei Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. Cavalieri was open to the older man's affection: I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours. Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo until his death.

Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred sonnets and madrigals, constituting the largest sequence of poems that he composed. Some modern commentators assert that the relationship was merely a Platonic affection, even suggesting that Michelangelo was seeking a surrogate son. However, their homoerotic nature was recognized in his own time, so that a decorous veil was drawn across them by his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, who published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds, the early British homosexual activist, undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.

The sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth by fifty years.

— (Michael Sullivan, translation) Late in life he nurtured a great love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Michelangelo had physical relationships (Condivi ascribed to him a "monk-like chastity"), but through his poetry and visual art we may at least glimpse the arc of his imagination.

Michelangelo's Timeline

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