Michelangelo Buonarroti (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy. His father worked for the Florentine government, and shortly after he was born his family returned to Florence, the city Michelangelo would always call his true home. His mother past away when he was 6, and at first his father did not approve of his son’s interest in art as a career. At 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, mainly known for his murals.
A year later, his talent drew the attention of Florence’s leading citizen and art patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who enjoyed the sensible encouragement of being surrounded by the city’s most literate, poetic and talented men. He long an invitation to Michelangelo to reside in a room of his palatial Michelangelo learned from and was inspired by the scholars and writers in Lorenzo’s intellectual circle, and his later work would forever be informed by what he learned about philosophy and politics in those years.
While staying in the Medici home, he also refined his technique under the instruction of Bertoldo di Giovanni, keeper of Lorenzo’s collection of ancient Roman sculptures and a noted sculptor himself Michelangelo was working in Rome by 1498, when he received a career-making commission from the visiting French cardinal Jean Bilheres de Lagraulas, envoy of King Charles VIII to the pope. The cardinal wanted to create a substantial statue depicting a draped Virgin Mary with her dead son resting in her arms—a Pieta—to grace his own future tomb.
Michelangelo’s delicate 69-inch-tall masterpiece featuring two intricate figures carved from one block of marble continues to draw legions of visitors to St. Peter’s Basilica more than 500 years after it’s completion. Michelangelo returned to Florence and in 1501 was contracted to create, again from marble, a huge male figure to enhance the city’s famous Duomo, officially the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
He chose to depict the young David from the Old Testament, heroic, energetic, powerful and spiritual, and literally larger than life at 17 feet tall. The sculpture, considered by scholars to be nearly technically perfect, remains in Florence at the Galleria dell’Accademia, where it is a world-renowned symbol of the city and its artistic heritage. In 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt him a grand tomb with 40 life-size statues, and the artist began work.
But the pope’s priorities shifted away from the project as he became embroiled in military disputes and his funds became scarce, and a displeased Michelangelo left Rome although he continued to work on the tomb, off and on, for decades. However, in 1508, Julius called Michelangelo back to Rome for a less expensive, but still ambitious painting project to depict the 12 apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a most sacred part of the Vatican where new popes are elected and inaugurated.
Instead, over the course of the four-year project, Michelangelo painted 12 figures seven prophets and five sibyls around the border of the ceiling, and filled the central space with scenes from Genesis. Critics suggest that the way Michelangelo depicts the prophet Ezekiel as strong yet stressed, determined yet unsure is symbolic of Michelangelo’s sensitivity to the intrinsic complexity of the human condition.
The most famous Sistine Chapel ceiling painting is the emotion-infused The Creation of Adam, in which God and Adam outstretch their hands to one another. Michelangelo continued to sculpt and paint until his death, although he increasingly worked on architectural projects as he aged: His work from 1520 to 1527 on the interior of the Medici Chapel in Florence included wall designs, windows and cornices that were unusual in their design as well as proportions and introduced startling variations on classical forms.
Michelangelo also designed the iconic dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Among his other masterpieces are Moses The Last Judgment and Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk. From the 1530s on, Michelangelo wrote poems; about 300 survive. Many incorporate the philosophy of Neo-Platonism-that a human soul, powered by love and ecstasy, can reunite with an almighty God-ideas that had been the subject of intense discussion while he was an adolescent living in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household.
After he left Florence permanently in 1534 for Rome, Michelangelo also wrote many lyrical letters to his family members who remained there. The theme of many was his strong attachment to various young men, especially aristocrat Tommaso Cavalieri. Scholars debate whether this was more an expression of homosexuality or a bittersweet longing by the unmarried, childless, aging Michelangelo for a father-son relationship.
Michelangelo died after a short illness in 1564 at 88, surviving far past the usual life expectancy of the era. A pieta he had begun sculpting in the late 1540s, intended for his own tomb, remained unfinished but is on display at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, in Florence-not very far from where Michelangelo is buried, at the Basilica di Santa Croce. I enjoy classical artwork and his says a lot even though I don’t know what its saying but I like it Italian artist make religious art but the craft is amazing.
