Michelangelo

• 1. The Divine One

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  Michelangelo carved one of his most famous works, the Pietà, before he turned 30, then sculpted David before the same milestone. He insisted he was no painter, yet he produced two of the most influential frescoes in Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. His contemporaries had a name for him. They called him Il Divino, the divine one. They praised his terribilità, his ability to instill a sense of awe in anyone who looked at his work.

  He was born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni on the 6th of March 1475, in the Republic of Florence, and died on the 18th of February 1564. He was a sculptor, a painter, an architect, and a poet of the High Renaissance. He was also the first Western artist whose biography appeared while he was still alive. Three were published in his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, claimed his work surpassed that of any artist living or dead.

  How does a banker's son from a small Tuscan town become an archetypal Renaissance man? Why did a sculptor who scorned the brush end up defining painting for generations? And what kind of person sleeps in his boots while sitting on a fortune larger than many princes possessed? The answers run through marble quarries, papal feuds, hidden chambers, and more than three hundred poems. We begin with the milk of a stonecutter's wife.

• 2. Milk And Marble

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  In Settignano, a small Tuscan town, the young Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, a stonecutter. His father owned a marble quarry and a small farm there. The boy absorbed something in that household. As Vasari quotes him: "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."

  The family had been small-scale bankers in Florence for generations, but the bank failed. His father Ludovico briefly held a government post in Caprese, serving as the town's judicial administrator and as podestà of Chiusi della Verna. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. She died in 1481, when he was six years old. The Buonarrotis claimed descent from the Countess Matilde di Canossa, a claim that remains unproven but which Michelangelo himself believed.

  In 1488, at the age of 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master of fresco who ran the largest workshop in Florence. The next year his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay the boy as an artist, a rarity for someone so young. When Lorenzo de' Medici asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils in 1489, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci to the de facto ruler of Florence.

  From 1490 to 1492 Michelangelo attended the Platonic Academy, a Humanist academy founded by the Medicis. There he met some of the most prominent thinkers of the day, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano. He sculpted his flattened reliefs, the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs, the latter on a theme suggested by Poliziano. When he was 17, a fellow pupil named Pietro Torrigiano struck him on the nose, leaving a disfigurement visible in every portrait of him afterward.

• 3. The Buried Cupid

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  On the 8th of April 1492, Lorenzo de' Medici died, and Michelangelo's protected world changed overnight. He left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. He carved a polychrome wooden Crucifix in 1493 as a gift to the prior of the church of Santo Spirito, which in return let him study anatomy by dissecting corpses from the church's hospital. It was the first of several times he would cut into cadavers to learn the body.

  In 1494 the Medici were expelled from Florence amid the rise of Savonarola, and Michelangelo fled to Venice, then to Bologna. There he carved several of the last small figures for the Shrine of St. Dominic and studied the robust reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia around the portal of the Basilica of St Petronius. One panel, The Creation of Eve, would later reappear on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

  A sculpted Cupid set Michelangelo on the road to Rome through an act of fraud. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici asked him to make a sleeping Cupid look as if it had been buried, so it could be passed off in Rome as an ancient work and sold for more. A middleman cheated both men out of the real value. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who had bought it, discovered the deception, but was so impressed by the quality that he invited the artist to Rome.

  Michelangelo arrived in Rome on the 25th of June 1496, aged 21. On the 4th of July he began a Bacchus for Cardinal Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god, which the cardinal then rejected. In November 1497 the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned a Pietà showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. Michelangelo was 24 when he finished it. It bears his name on Mary's sash, the only work he is known to have signed.

• 4. Symbol Of Florence

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  The consuls of the Guild of Wool handed Michelangelo a problem that had sat for 40 years: a colossal block of Carrara marble, a project begun by Agostino di Duccio, meant to portray David as a symbol of Florentine freedom for the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo answered with the statue of David, completed in 1504. The work established him as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and symbolic imagination.

  A team of consultants gathered to decide where the David should stand, and the names read like a roll call of the era. Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Andrea della Robbia, Andrea Sansovino, and Michelangelo's friend Granacci, among others, settled on the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. The original now stands in the Accademia, and in 1910 a marble replica took its place in the square. The BBC has called the David the world's most famous statue.

  In early 1504 Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo was set to paint the Battle of Cascina on the same walls, and the two visions could not have differed more. Leonardo showed soldiers fighting on horseback. Michelangelo showed soldiers ambushed as they bathed in a river. Neither work was finished, and both were lost when the chamber was refurbished, though copies survive.

  Angelo Doni commissioned a Holy Family from Michelangelo as a present for his wife, Maddalena Strozzi. Known as the Doni Madonna, it hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, still in its original frame, which Michelangelo may have designed. Its twisting forms and bright color heralded what he would soon attempt on a ceiling in Rome.

• 5. Genesis On The Ceiling

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  Pope Julius II called Michelangelo back to Rome in 1505 to build his tomb, a project meant to include forty statues and finish in five years. Both men had hot tempers, and they soon argued. On the 17th of April 1506 Michelangelo fled Rome in secret for Florence, staying until the Florentine government pressed him to return. He worked on the tomb for 40 years and never finished it to his satisfaction. It survives in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, famous for its central figure of Moses, completed in 1516.

  By Condivi's account, the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling began as a trap. Bramante, jealous of Michelangelo's tomb commission, convinced the pope to assign him a medium he did not know, hoping he would fail. Michelangelo was first asked only to paint the Twelve Apostles on the pendentives. He persuaded Julius II to give him a free hand and proposed a far more complex scheme, covering Creation, the Fall of Man, the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ.

  The composition stretches over 500 square metres and contains over 300 figures, painted between 1508 and 1512, roughly four years of work. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis. On the pendentives sit twelve prophets and Sibyls who foretold the coming of Jesus, seven prophets of Israel and five prophetic women of the Classical world. The Creation of Adam stands among the most reproduced works in the history of art.

  Michelangelo wove himself into the ceiling more than once. The prophet Jeremiah, contemplating the downfall of Jerusalem, is a self-portrait, and as the model for the Creator he painted himself in the act of painting. He began with the later episodes in the narrative, starting with the Drunkenness of Noah, then made his figures larger once the first scaffolding came down. The final panel, the Separation of Light from Darkness, was the broadest in style and painted in a single day.

• 6. Medici Tombs And Quarries

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  In 1513 Pope Julius II died and Pope Leo X succeeded him, the second son of Lorenzo de' Medici. Leo pulled Michelangelo off Julius's tomb and set him to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Michelangelo spent three years on drawings and models and even tried to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta for the project. In 1520 his financially strapped patrons abruptly cancelled it. The basilica lacks a façade to this day.

  The Medici came back in 1520 with a family funerary chapel in the same basilica, and this time the work survived. The Medici Chapel houses the tombs of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and his nephew Lorenzo, with allegorical figures representing Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn. In 1976 a concealed corridor was discovered with drawings on its walls relating to the chapel itself.

  When Florentine citizens threw out the Medici in 1527 and restored the republic, Michelangelo took up his city's defense, working on its fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530, the Medici returned, and Pope Clement VII, a Medici, sentenced him to death. He is thought to have hidden for two months in a small chamber under the Medici chapels, lit by a tiny window, making charcoal and chalk drawings. That room stayed hidden until 1975 and opened to small numbers of visitors in 2023. Clement eventually pardoned him.

  The Laurentian Library, commissioned by Clement in 1524, shows Michelangelo bending architecture toward something new. He designed a vestibule whose staircase appears to spill out like a flow of lava, a dynamic form seen as a forerunner of Baroque architecture. Construction fell to assistants. The library did not open until 1571, and the vestibule remained incomplete until 1904.

• 7. Flayed Skin And Faith

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  Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned The Last Judgment for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, and his successor Pope Paul III made sure it was finished. Michelangelo laboured on it from 1534 to October 1541, depicting the Second Coming and the judgment of souls. He broke with convention, showing Jesus as a massive, muscular, youthful, beardless, naked figure. Among the saints, Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin bearing the likeness of Michelangelo himself.

  The naked Christ and Virgin Mary drew charges of sacrilege. Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the pope resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the genitals, and Daniele da Volterra, his apprentice, made the alterations. An uncensored copy by Marcello Venusti survives in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples.

  Michelangelo's faith deepened at the end of his life, and he was a devout Catholic enrolled, along with Raphael, in the Secular Franciscan Order. His poem 285, written in 1554, closes with the lines: "Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in."

  In his personal habits he lived as a paradox. He told his apprentice Ascanio Condivi, "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man," though his net worth was about 50,000 gold ducats, more than many princes and dukes. Condivi said he ate "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and often slept in his clothes and boots. His biographer Paolo Giovio called his domestic habits incredibly squalid, describing a man who withdrew himself from the company of men.

• 8. The Poems And The Feuds

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  More than three hundred sonnets and madrigals flowed from Michelangelo's pen, and about sixty are addressed to men, described as the first significant modern corpus of love poetry from one man to another. The longest sequence was written to the young Roman patrician Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who was 23 when Michelangelo met him in 1532 at the age of 57. These poems predate Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth by 50 years. Cavalieri replied: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you."

  Michelangelo's grandnephew tried to soften this legacy. Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed, removing words and insisting the poems be read allegorically. In 1893 John Addington Symonds translated them into English and restored the original genders, and it has since become more accepted that the poems indicate a personal preference for young men. Anthony Hughes calls it a reasonable guess that Michelangelo's sexuality inclined toward men.

  In 1542 Michelangelo met Cecchino dei Bracci, who died only a year later, inspiring 48 funeral epigrams. Some objects of his affection took advantage of him. The model Febo di Poggio asked for money in response to a love-poem, and a second model, Gherardo Perini, stole from him. Late in life he nurtured a friendship with the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, whom he met in Rome around 1536 or 1538. Condivi alleged Michelangelo's sole regret was that he did not kiss her face as he had her hand.

  His rivalries ran as hot as his friendships. In a letter from late 1542 Michelangelo blamed his troubles with Julius II on the envy of Bramante and Raphael, saying of Raphael, "all he had in art, he got from me." Gian Paolo Lomazzo recorded a single meeting between the two: Michelangelo, walking alone, said he thought he had met the chief of police, and Raphael, surrounded by followers, replied that he thought he had met an executioner, since executioners walk alone.

  At the age of 71 Michelangelo took on the work that would crown his life, succeeding Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as architect of St. Peter's Basilica in 1546. Foundations had been laid in 1506 to plans by Bramante, and successive architects had made little progress. Michelangelo returned to Bramante's concepts, strengthening the design for a centrally planned church. The dome, not completed until after his death, has been called by Banister Fletcher "the greatest creation of the Renaissance."

  In his old age he carved a number of Pietàs that reflect on mortality. In the Florentine Pietà he depicted himself as the aged Nicodemus lowering the body of Jesus. He smashed the left arm and leg of the Jesus figure, and his pupil Tiberio Calcagni repaired the arm. The last sculpture he worked on, six days before his death, was the Rondanini Pietà, which he carved away until there was insufficient stone to finish. Its abstract quality matches 20th-century concepts of sculpture.

  Michelangelo died in Rome on the 18th of February 1564, at the age of 88. His body was taken from Rome to the Basilica of Santa Croce, fulfilling his last request to be buried in his beloved Florence. His heir Lionardo Buonarroti commissioned Vasari to design the Tomb of Michelangelo, a project that cost 770 scudi and took over 14 years. Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Tuscany, supplied the marble and organized a state funeral.

  Michelangelo outlived both Leonardo and Raphael by more than 40 years, and his reach extended far beyond his lifetime. The unfinished giants for Julius's tomb shaped sculptors such as Rodin and Henry Moore, who studied the Slaves at the Louvre. The dome of St. Peter's influenced churches and civic domes for centuries, from Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome to St Paul's Cathedral in London and state capitals across the United States.