Michelangelo

Based on Wikipedia: Michelangelo

In 1497, the most powerful men in Italy gathered to witness something extraordinary: a seventeen-year-old boy had just carved a crucifix from wood so exquisite that viewers wept. The creator was Michelangelo, and within a decade he would transform every wall and ceiling he touched into an argument about the nature of beauty itself.

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, a small Tuscan town perched in the Valtiberina near Arezzo. His father, Ludovico, had briefly served as podestà—a local administrator—of Chiusi della Verna, while his mother Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena came from noble Sienese stock. The Buonarrotis claimed lineage from Countess Matilde di Canossa, a claim that stuck in Michelangelo's imagination even if historians remained skeptical.

The family returned to Florence within months of his birth, and young Michelangelo grew up in the city that was rapidly becoming Italy's greatest center of art and learning. When his mother died in 1481—Michelangelo was only six—the boy was sent to live with a stonecutter and his wife in Settigniano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. There, among the dust and smell of cut stone, the child absorbed what would become his deepest passion: the love of working marble.

"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"

The quote, recorded by his biographer Giorgio Vasari, captures how Michelangelo himself understood his gift—as inseparable from the place and air that formed him.

Florence: The Making of an Artist

As a boy, Michelangelo was sent to study grammar under Francesco da Urbino, a Humanist teacher. He showed no interest whatsoever in formal schooling. Instead, he preferred to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters. The city of Florence in the 1480s pulsed with creative energy; the Renaissance—a renewal of classical scholarship and the arts—had its first flowering there.

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi had studied the ruins of ancient Rome and created two churches, San Lorenzo's and Santo Spirito, that embodied classical precepts. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had labored for fifty years on the bronze doors of the Baptistry, creating what Michelangelo would later describe as "The Gates of Paradise." The exterior niches of Orsanmichele contained works by Donatello, Verrocchio, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco—the most acclaimed sculptors in Florence.

Frescoes covered older church interiors: Giotto's work, continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel—both artists whose works Michelangelo studied and copied in drawings during his childhood.

In 1488, at just thirteen years old, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master of fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing, and portraiture who ran the largest workshop in Florence. The next year, Michelangelo's father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay the boy as an artist—a rare occurrence for someone so young.

By 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils. Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.

The Platonic Academy and Early Work

From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Platonic Academy, a Humanist institution founded by the Medici. There, his work and outlook were shaped by the most prominent philosophers of the day: Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano.

At this time, he sculpted two flattened reliefs that would later be called the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs—the latter based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici. Michelangelo worked alongside Bertoldo di Giovanni, another sculptor.

When he was seventeen, another pupil—Pietro Torrigzano—struck him on the nose during an argument, causing a disfigurement that remained conspicuous in all later portraits of Michelangelo.

Lorenzo de' Medici died on 8 April 1492. His death changed everything for the young artist. Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months, he carved a polychrome wooden Crucifix as a gift to the prior of Santo Spirito, which had allowed him to study anatomical specimens from the church's hospital. This was the first of several instances during his career that Michelangelo studied anatomy by dissecting cadavers—a practice both repelled and fascinated those who witnessed it.

Between 1493 and 1494, he purchased a block of marble and carved a larger-than-life Hercules. On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir Piero de' Medici commissioned a statue made of snow—and Michelangelo again entered the Medici court.

In 1494, the Medici were expelled from Florence following the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left before the end of the political upheaval, moving first to Venice, then to Bologna. In Bologna, he was commissioned to carve several of the last small figures for the Shrine of St. Dominic at the Church of San Domenico.

At this time, Michelangelo studied robust reliefs carved by Jacopo della Quercia around the main portal of the Basilica of St. Petronius—including the panel of The Creation of Eve, a composition that would reappear on the Sistine Chapel ceiling decades later.

The Scandal of Genius

The young Michelangelo had already absorbed everything Florence could teach him. But nothing prepared his contemporaries for what came next.

Two works made before he was thirty years old secured his reputation: the Pietà and the David. The marble Pietà in Rome—commissioned for the French cardinal Jean Bilancier, completed between 1498 and 1499—showed a dead Christ cradled by the Virgin Mary; it was so beautiful that visitors wept, just as they wept before Titian's work or Botticelli's Venus.

The David—a marble sculpture standing nearly seventeen feet tall—was completed in 1504. It made Michelangelo famous overnight and demonstrated his ability to transform cold stone into human drama.

Yet Michelangelo did not consider himself a painter. He created two of the most influential frescoes in Western art anyway: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. Pope Julius II commissioned both works. Michelangelo painted them between 1508 and 1512.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling contained nine episodes from the Book of Genesis: the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Flood, Noah, the sacrifice of Noah, the sin of Adam and Cain and Lamech, God dividing the waters and calling forth the sun, Moses receiving God's laws. The paintings were so beautiful that viewers stood in silence, unable to speak.

Saint Peter's and Legacy

At age seventy-one, Michelangelo succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as architect of St. Peter's Basilica. He transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his design—particularly the dome, which was completed after his death with some modifications.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive: three biographies appeared during his lifetime. One, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three"—painting, sculpture, and architecture.

In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). His contemporaries admired his terribilità—his ability to instill a sense of awe in viewers. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate his expressive physicality contributed to the rise of Mannerism—a short-lived movement in Western art between the High Renaissance and the Baroque.

He was born in the Republic of Florence but was mostly active in Rome from his thirties onwards. His work was inspired by models from classical antiquity—the ruins of Rome, the fragments of Greek sculpture—and had a lasting influence on Western art that continues today.

Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the sixteenth century. Contemporary biographers lauded him as the most accomplished artist of his era—Leonardo da Vinci was his rival and elder contemporary—but it was Michelangelo who transformed sculpture from craft into intellectual argument.

By the time he died on 18 February 1564 in Rome, at eighty-eight years old, he had completed works that redefined what art could be. He left behind an inheritance: every Renaissance painting after him measured itself against his genius.