Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known as Michelangelo, is considered one of the most prominent sculptors, painters, architects, and poets of the Renaissance. His works, inspired by models from the classical antiquity period, have had a lasting influence on the Western art scene. Michelangelo’s versatile creative abilities and mastery in various artistic domains make him an archetypal Renaissance man, alongside his rival Leonardo da Vinci.
An extensive amount of surviving correspondence, sketches, and memoirs make Michelangelo one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century.
Michelangelo’s Biography
Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, which is now called Caprese Michelangelo, a small town in Valtiberina near Arezzo, Tuscany. His family had been small bankers in Florence for several generations, but bankruptcy and fate led them to Caprese, where Michelangelo was born.
A few months after Michelangelo’s birth, the family returned to Florence, where he grew up. During his mother’s later prolonged illness and after her death in 1481 (when he was six years old), Michelangelo lived with a nursemaid and her husband, a stonecutter, in the town of Settignano. Here, his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. It was here that he developed his love for marble. As Giorgio Vasari quotes him: “If there is anything good about me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your land, Arezzo. With my nurse’s milk, I received the ability to handle chisel and hammer, with which I create my figures.”
As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the humanist Francesco da Urbino. He showed no interest in his schooling but preferred to copy paintings from churches and associate with other painters. Florence was a hub of art and culture at the time. The city was the heart of the Renaissance and a center of learning and creativity.
At the time, Florence was Italy’s foremost center for art and learning. Art was supported by the Signoria (city council), merchant guilds, and wealthy patrons like the Medici family and their banking connections. The Renaissance, a revival of classical scholarship and art, had its first flourishing in Florence. In the early 15th century, architect Filippo Brunelleschi, after studying the remains of classical buildings in Rome, created two churches, San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, which expressed classical principles. Sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had worked for fifty years on the northern and eastern bronze doors of the baptistry, which Michelangelo would later describe as the “Gates of Paradise.” On the niches of the Orsanmichele church, there was a collection of works by the most renowned sculptors of Florence: Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. The interiors of the older churches were covered in frescoes (primarily in late medieval and early Renaissance style), begun by Giotto and continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, whose works Michelangelo studied and copied in drawings.
In Michelangelo’s childhood, a team of painters was called from Florence to the Vatican to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing, and portraiture, who had the largest workshop in Florence. In 1488, at the age of 13, Michelangelo became an apprentice to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father convinced Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was rare for a fourteen-year-old. In 1489, when Lorenzo de’ Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, asked for Ghirlandaio’s two best students, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.
From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended Plato’s Academy, a humanistic academy founded by the Medici family. Here, his work and views were influenced by many of the era’s prominent philosophers and authors, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano. During this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna on the Steps (1490–1492) and the Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492), the latter based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Michelangelo worked alongside sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni for a while. When he was seventeen, another student, Pietro Torrigiano, struck him on the nose, causing the deformity that is prominent in portraits of Michelangelo.
Michelangelo Achieved Fame in His Lifetime
Michelangelo was the first Western artist to have his biography published while he was alive. In fact, three biographies about him were published during his lifetime. One of them, written by Giorgio Vasari, claimed that Michelangelo’s works surpassed any artist, living or deceased and that he was “superior not only in one art but in all three.”
Michelangelo achieved fame early in his career; two of his most famous works, the Pietà and David, were created before he turned thirty. Although he didn’t consider himself a painter, Michelangelo created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the Last Judgment on the altar wall.
In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often referred to as Il Divino (“the divine”). His contemporaries often admired his terribilità – his ability to instill a sense of awe in viewers of his art.
Michelangelo as an Architect
Michelangelo’s design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture, which followed the High Renaissance.
At the age of 71, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo altered the plan so that the western end was completed according to his own design, and the dome as well, with certain modifications, after his death.