Michelangelo

Their life

Florentine sculptor, painter, and architect of the High Renaissance whose David, Pietà, and Sistine Chapel ceiling set a standard of human artistry rarely equaled. A relentless, solitary perfectionist, he worked into his eighties and considered himself first a sculptor.

Known for

• The David
• The Sistine Chapel ceiling
• The Pietà
• The Last Judgment
• Design of St. Peter's dome
• Poetry and personal letters

The road they walked

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in Caprese, a small Tuscan village where his father briefly held a minor administrative post, and raised mostly in Florence and Settignano, a town of stonecutters whose quarry dust, he liked to joke, ran in his blood. His family was minor gentry fallen on hard times, and they resisted his early pull toward art as beneath their station. He won that argument by sheer talent: apprenticed at thirteen to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, he was soon invited into the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, where he studied ancient sculpture alongside the Medici's own collection and rubbed shoulders with the humanist scholars who shaped his lifelong fascination with classical form and Christian spirit together.

He came of age in a Florence electric with change — Savonarola's fiery sermons, the Medici's fall and return, the rediscovery of antiquity fueling a citywide hunger to rival Greece and Rome. Michelangelo carried that ambition to Rome and back, carving the Pietà at twenty-four with a technical audacity that made his name, then returning to Florence to spend three years on a block of marble other sculptors had abandoned as ruined, producing David, a civic monument as much as a religious one, installed in the city's main square as a symbol of Florentine defiance.

His reputation as a sculptor was so fixed in his own mind that he resented being pulled away from marble into other commissions, yet those commissions became the ones that made him immortal to history at large. Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome and, against his objections, set him to painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — four years of solitary, backbreaking labor completed in 1512 that reimagined what a painted ceiling could hold. He would return to that chapel decades later, in his sixties, to paint The Last Judgment on its altar wall. In between and after, he turned increasingly to architecture, designing the dome of St. Peter's Basilica and reshaping Rome's civic center at the Campidoglio, working for popes and patrons across six decades until his final years, still drawing and revising, well into his eighties.

How their story ended

Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564, just weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, having worked on architectural projects, including St. Peter's, almost to the end. He died of natural causes attributed to old age, surrounded by friends and attended by his own request for simplicity in his final rites. His body was later moved to Florence, the city of his youth, and buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb still stands among the artists and thinkers he helped define an age around.

In their words

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Tables where Michelangelo sits

The Renaissance Studio

For making work that outlives you.

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