Meet Michelangelo: He Called Himself a Sculptor and Took the Ceiling Anyway

The ruined block

The marble that became the David had been quarried decades earlier, worked at by two other sculptors, and abandoned as spoiled. Michelangelo took it and got the figure out of it between 1501 and 1504, at twenty-six.

He considered himself a sculptor above everything else, and said so his whole life. He signed exactly one work — the Pietà — after overhearing it credited to somebody else.

Standing, not lying down

He took the Sistine ceiling reluctantly, and painted it over roughly four years standing on scaffolding, head back, not lying on his back as the story has it.

We know what it felt like because he wrote a comic sonnet about it: his beard pointing at heaven, his spine buckling, his brush dripping paint onto his face, and a complaint at the end that he is no painter and this is not his trade.

The tragedy of the tomb

The commission he never escaped was a tomb for Pope Julius II, contracted for forty figures. He worked at it, on and off, for four decades, delivered a fraction of it, and called the whole affair the tragedy of his life.

At seventy-one he was appointed architect of St Peter's and worked on it until he died at eighty-eight, refusing payment for the work.

The parts he kept private

He wrote about three hundred poems, many of them to a young Roman nobleman; his grandnephew changed the pronouns before publishing them. He slept in his clothes and boots for weeks while working, by Condivi's account. Near the end he burned drawings and studies, apparently so that nobody would see how much effort the work had cost.

He died still working. His nephew had the body smuggled out of Rome in a bale so it could be buried in Florence. A year later the nudes of his Last Judgement were painted over by an artist the city nicknamed the breeches-maker.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you are doing work you did not choose and resent. He produced the ceiling in exactly that state of mind, and he will have no patience for the idea that resentment excuses you from doing it well.