Michelangelo had a flattened nose, broken by a fellow sculptor when both were young men in Florence. It never healed straight, and the portraits made by people who knew him kept it.
The man who broke it was Pietro Torrigiano, and he bragged about it afterward. Benvenuto Cellini heard the story from Torrigiano himself and wrote it down.
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The face around that nose is harder to pin down than its fame suggests. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote Michelangelo's life while the artist was still alive, counted only two painted portraits of him, plus one bronze.
He carved prophets, gods and popes' tombs, and his own face reached posterity through other hands. It survives in a handful of pictures, and in copies that wandered from one collection to another, some of them mislabeled along the way.
One of those pictures was later hung in a Florentine museum as something it was not. Another, the one that looks most like a man and least like a monument, was never finished.
What You'll Discover
Who broke his nose.
The portrait mistaken for his own.
Which friend came closest.
Where he may have hidden his face.