Michelangelo Buonarroti was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet. He was born in 1475 near Arezzo, a town in Tuscany, and died in Rome in 1564, at 88.
He carved the Pietà and the David, frescoed the vault of the Sistine Chapel, painted the Last Judgment on its altar wall and designed the dome of St Peter's. He always thought of himself as a sculptor first.
While he was still at work on the Sistine ceiling, he told a friend that he was no painter at all. His long life was full of quarrels with popes, and at the end of it two cities fought over his body.
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His story starts in the Tuscan countryside. Michelangelo was born in Caprese, a village near Arezzo, where his father served as a local magistrate. The boy was then raised in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, where his father owned a marble quarry, by a nurse whose husband was a stonecutter.
At 13 he was apprenticed in Florence to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, but he did not stay long. Lorenzo de' Medici, head of the family that ruled the city, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, and Michelangelo was one of them.
He went to study among Lorenzo's ancient statues and the scholars gathered around him. One of the other students there left a mark on his face that lasted his whole life.
A punch in the Medici circle
That student was the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano…
What You'll Discover
Whose punch flattened his nose.
The one name he ever carved.
What Florence did with a rejected block.
Why a pope's tomb haunted him.
How he really stood to paint.
Who was hired to cover his nudes.