What Did Michelangelo Look Like?
Michelangelo was short, lean and famously plain, with a broken nose that flattened his face for life.
He broke it as a teenager, when a jealous fellow student punched him in the studio.
He knew he was no beauty, and he never pretended otherwise.
His face in brief
Build: short and lean, hardened by years of carving.
The nose: broken in his teens and never set right.
Hair and beard: dark, going gray, a forked beard in old age.
Self image: he thought himself ugly and said so.
Best likenesses: portraits by Daniele da Volterra, and a hidden self portrait.
The broken nose
As a teenager, Michelangelo studied among other young artists in the Medici garden in Florence.
He had a sharp tongue, and one day he pushed a fellow student named Pietro Torrigiano too far. Torrigiano punched him and crushed the bridge of his nose. Years later he bragged that he had felt the bone give way.
The flattened nose stayed with Michelangelo for the rest of his life.
What people who knew him wrote
His biographers Condivi and Vasari describe a man of medium height, broad in the shoulders, lean and dark.
They note the flattened nose and a modest, watchful face. Handsome was not a word anyone used.
The portraits we can trust
The most reliable images come from Daniele da Volterra, a friend who portrayed him late in life.
They show the worn face and the forked gray beard of his final years. For the room that beard worked under, read who painted the Sistine Chapel.
The face he hid in his own painting
Michelangelo left a portrait of himself in the strangest place imaginable.
High on the Last Judgment, the martyred Saint Bartholomew holds his own flayed skin. The face on that empty skin is Michelangelo's. He painted himself as a discarded hide, and to me it is the most honest self portrait he ever left.
It is one of the strangest hidden signatures in art, the kind collected in seven secrets hidden in famous paintings.
A man who did not fuss over appearances
He lived plainly and worked to the point of exhaustion. Condivi records that he often slept in his clothes and boots, too absorbed to undress.
The richest sculptor of his age dressed like a laborer, too absorbed to care. To me that plainness is the real likeness. I trace his whole restless life in Michelangelo: The Complete Story.
FAQ about what Michelangelo looked like
What did he look like? Short, lean and plain, with a permanently broken nose.
How did he break his nose? A fellow student, Pietro Torrigiano, punched him as a teenager.
Are there real portraits of him? Yes. The most trusted are by Daniele da Volterra.
Did he paint himself? Yes, as the flayed skin in the Last Judgment.
Was he considered handsome? No, and he agreed.