Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a small Tuscan town where his father Lodovico briefly served as the local Florentine magistrate ^[1]. The family returned to Florence within weeks of the birth, and the infant was placed with a wet nurse in Settignano, a village of stonecutters near the city. Michelangelo later liked to say that he absorbed hammer and chisel along with his nurse's milk, a remark recorded by his biographer Ascanio Condivi ^[2].

The Buonarroti family claimed descent from minor nobility but lived on modest means, and Lodovico considered manual art beneath the family's dignity. The boy resisted a conventional grammar education and, after considerable friction at home, was apprenticed at thirteen to the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, then the busiest fresco painter in Florence ^[1]. There he learned the demanding technique of painting on wet plaster, a skill he would set aside for years and then use on the grandest possible scale.

Within a year Ghirlandaio recommended his apprentice to Lorenzo de' Medici, who was gathering promising young artists to study antique sculpture in the garden of San Marco. Michelangelo lived in the Medici household from about 1490 to 1492, dining alongside poets and philosophers of Lorenzo's circle, including thinkers steeped in Neoplatonism ^[3]. Two marble reliefs survive from these teenage years, the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs, both now in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence ^[3].

Lorenzo's death in 1492 ended the sheltered arrangement, and the political convulsions that followed, including the rise of the preacher Girolamo Savonarola and the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, pushed Michelangelo to leave Florence. He worked briefly in Bologna, carving small figures for the shrine of San Domenico, before returning home ^[1]. A sleeping Cupid he carved around 1495 was artificially aged and sold in Rome as an antique. When the deception surfaced, the buyer, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, was struck by the skill involved and invited the young sculptor to Rome ^[2].

Rome made his name. In 1496 he carved a life-size Bacchus for a private patron, and in 1498 the French cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas commissioned a Pietà for a chapel in Old St. Peter's. The finished group, showing the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ across her lap, drew immediate acclaim for its polish and emotional restraint. Michelangelo was twenty-four. It is the only work he ever signed, cutting his name into the strap across Mary's chest ^[4].

Back in Florence in 1501, he accepted a challenge other sculptors had avoided: a colossal marble block, quarried decades earlier and left damaged, that the cathedral works committee wanted turned into a figure of David. Over three years he carved a nude giant more than five meters tall, alert and tense rather than triumphant. A committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli debated its placement, and in 1504 the statue was installed outside the Palazzo della Signoria as a civic emblem of the Florentine republic ^[5]. The original has stood in the Galleria dell'Accademia since 1873 ^[5].

Any list of Michelangelo achievements begins with the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Pope Julius II first summoned him to Rome in 1505 to build a vast papal tomb, a project that shrank over four decades and which the artist called the tragedy of his life. In 1508 Julius redirected him to fresco the chapel ceiling instead. Michelangelo protested that painting was not his profession, then spent four years, from 1508 to 1512, covering roughly 500 square meters of vault with more than 300 figures ^[6]. The scheme runs from the Creation through the story of Noah, framed by prophets, sibyls, and the athletic nudes known as ignudi. The Creation of Adam, with its nearly touching fingertips, became one of the most reproduced images in Western art ^[6].

He returned to the same chapel a generation later. Between 1536 and 1541, for Popes Clement VII and Paul III, he painted The Last Judgment across the entire altar wall, a swirling composition of the saved and the damned centered on a beardless, muscular Christ. The abundance of nude figures provoked criticism during the Counter-Reformation, and after Michelangelo's death the painter Daniele da Volterra was ordered to add draperies ^[6].

Sculpture remained his declared vocation. The Moses, finished for the reduced Julius tomb in San Pietro in Vincoli, and the two captive figures now in the Louvre show the muscular expressiveness that contemporaries called terribilità. In Florence he designed and carved the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo between 1519 and 1534, pairing tombs for two Medici dukes with allegorical figures of Dawn, Dusk, Day, and Night ^[3]. For the same church he designed the Laurentian Library, whose vestibule staircase broke classical rules so freely that historians treat it as a founding work of Mannerist architecture ^[1].

Architecture dominated his last decades. In 1546 Paul III appointed him chief architect of the new St. Peter's Basilica, a post he held without salary until his death. He simplified the plans of his predecessors, strengthened the central piers, and designed the great dome, completed after his death by Giacomo della Porta on lines close to his model ^[7]. He also reshaped the Campidoglio, Rome's civic square on the Capitoline Hill, with its oval pavement and matched palace facades ^[7].

Michelangelo never married and had no children. He lived plainly despite substantial earnings, dressed carelessly, and channeled money toward reestablishing the Buonarroti family fortunes, buying property around Florence and pressing his brothers and nephew about family status in a long stream of surviving letters ^[1]. Nearly five hundred of his letters survive, an unusually rich record for any early modern artist ^[8].

He was also a serious poet. About three hundred of his sonnets and madrigals survive, many addressed to the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de' Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532, and to the widowed poet Vittoria Colonna, his close spiritual companion from the late 1530s until her death in 1547 ^[8]. The poems to Cavalieri are among the most intense addressed by one man to another in Renaissance literature, and scholars have long debated their bearing on Michelangelo's inner life. His grandnephew altered pronouns in some poems when publishing them in 1623, and the original texts were not restored until the nineteenth century ^[8].

Contemporaries described a proud, guarded, sometimes abrasive man. A fellow student, Pietro Torrigiano, broke his nose in a quarrel during their youth, leaving it permanently flattened ^[2]. Yet the same sources record deep piety, generosity to assistants, and grief at the deaths of friends. Giorgio Vasari, who knew him personally, placed him at the summit of his Lives of the Artists in 1550, and Michelangelo remains one of very few artists whose biography was published twice in his own lifetime, since Condivi's account followed in 1553 ^[2].

From 1534 Michelangelo lived permanently in Rome, never returning to Florence after the Medici, restored as dukes, extinguished the republic he had supported. During the siege of Florence in 1529 and 1530 he had directed the city's fortifications, an episode that left his position awkward once the Medici regained power ^[1].

Old age barely slowed him. Alongside the work at St. Peter's he painted his final frescoes, the Conversion of Saul and the Crucifixion of Peter, in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel between 1542 and 1550 ^[6]. In private he carved two late Pietà groups, working the marble at night by candlelight. He mutilated and abandoned the Florentine Pietà, now in the cathedral museum in Florence, which includes a hooded Nicodemus widely read as a self-portrait. The Rondanini Pietà in Milan occupied him until days before his death, its elongated figures pared down almost to abstraction ^[4].

Michelangelo died in his Roman house at Macel de' Corvi on February 18, 1564, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday ^[1]. Pope Pius IV wanted him buried in St. Peter's, but his nephew Leonardo smuggled the body to Florence, reportedly disguised as merchandise. He was buried in Santa Croce, where Vasari designed his tomb, after an elaborate memorial service at San Lorenzo staged by the Florentine academy of artists ^[2].

Few careers changed the standing of art itself as thoroughly as this one. Contemporaries called him il divino, the divine one, and Vasari presented his work as the point where art surpassed both antiquity and nature ^[2]. The muscular, twisting figures of the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment set the vocabulary for Mannerism and shaped painters from Raphael, who adapted the ceiling's manner in his own Vatican rooms, to Rubens and beyond ^[6]. His architecture, especially the dome of St. Peter's, influenced domed churches and capitol buildings for centuries ^[7].

His works remain among the most visited objects on earth. Millions pass through the Sistine Chapel each year, and the restoration of the ceiling between 1980 and 1994 revealed unexpectedly bright color while igniting a lasting scholarly argument about cleaning methods ^[6]. The David draws crowds to the Accademia in Florence, and studies of the statue's condition, including hairline cracks in its ankles, continue to generate research and news coverage ^[5].

For readers of any Michelangelo biography, the essential Michelangelo facts hold steady across five centuries of scholarship: a Florentine stonecutter's temperament joined to relentless ambition, nine papal patrons, and a body of sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry that no single successor has matched in range. The house museum of the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, his letters, and his drawings, of which around six hundred survive, keep his working methods unusually open to study ^[3]. He remains the standard against which the idea of artistic genius is still measured.