Michelangelo Buonarroti: Biography

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a small village in Tuscany where his father was briefly serving as a local magistrate. He died on February 18, 1564, in Rome, at the age of 88 — having outlived virtually everyone he knew and having produced, across nine decades, a body of work in sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry that no artist before or since has matched for sheer range of achievement. He was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was still alive. His contemporaries called him il divino — the divine one.

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Florence and the Medici: The Formation of a Genius

Michelangelo’s mother died when he was seven. His father, recognizing early that his son had no interest in the family’s modest ambitions, apprenticed him at thirteen to the busy Florentine workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio — one of the most respected painters in the city, whose workshop produced frescoes for the city’s wealthiest patrons. Michelangelo later downplayed this apprenticeship, but it was there that he mastered the techniques of fresco painting and draughtsmanship that would underpin everything he did.

He spent only a year with Ghirlandaio before his talent drew the attention of Lorenzo de’ Medici — Lorenzo the Magnificent — who invited him into the Medici household. From around 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo lived among humanist scholars, poets, and philosophers at one of the most intellectually stimulating courts in Europe, studying ancient sculpture in the Medici garden under the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and absorbing the Neoplatonist ideas about beauty, form, and the divine that would permeate his work for the rest of his life.

He later recalled of his early exposure to stonecutting — he had been placed with a family of stonecutters as an infant — “I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse’s milk.” The line captures something true about him. He considered himself a sculptor above all else, and that conviction never changed regardless of what the popes demanded of him.

Lorenzo de’ Medici died in 1492. The political stability his patronage had provided collapsed. Michelangelo fled Florence briefly as political turmoil engulfed the city under the influence of the firebrand preacher Savonarola. He traveled to Bologna, then made his way to Rome in 1496.

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Rome: The Pietà and the First Masterpiece

In Rome, Michelangelo carved the Pietà (1498–1499) — the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ across her lap — commissioned by the French Cardinal Jean de Billheres for his funeral chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo was twenty-four years old. The sculpture is technically staggering: the Virgin’s figure, seated, supports a full-grown adult male across her lap without the composition straining credulity; the surfaces of flesh and fabric are differentiated with a delicacy that marble has no right to possess. It was an immediate sensation.

It is the only work Michelangelo ever signed. He overheard visitors attributing it to another sculptor, returned that night, and carved his name across the Virgin’s sash: Michelagniolo Bonarroti Fiorentino faciebat — Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence made this. He later said he regretted the vanity of the act.

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Florence Again: David

He returned to Florence around 1500, and between 1501 and 1504 carved the David from an enormous block of Carrara marble that had been sitting in the Florence Cathedral workshop for over twenty-five years, abandoned by two previous sculptors who considered it unworkable. The block was seventeen feet tall, deeply flawed, and partially roughed out. Michelangelo saw it differently.

The finished David — standing over five meters tall, depicting the biblical shepherd at the moment before his confrontation with Goliath, coiled tension in every muscle — was placed in the Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of Florentine civic pride. It is one of the most recognizable sculptures in Western art. It now stands in the Accademia Gallery in Florence.

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The Sistine Chapel Ceiling: Four Years of Misery

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo did not want the commission. He was a sculptor — he said so repeatedly. He was also in the middle of the far more important project of designing and carving Julius’s funerary tomb, which the pope had commissioned as a monument to himself and which Michelangelo considered the great work of his career. Julius redirected him. There is a theory, promoted by the Italian art writer Giorgio Vasari, that the architect Donato Bramante suggested the ceiling commission deliberately to humiliate Michelangelo — setting him up for public failure in a medium he was not known for. If so, the scheme failed spectacularly.

The ceiling — covering approximately 500 square meters and containing over 300 figures — took four years, from 1508 to 1512. Michelangelo dismissed his assistants and completed most of it himself. He painted on his back on scaffolding, developed a goiter from the sustained overhead strain, and wrote a poem to a friend describing the physical ordeal in vivid, self-mocking detail: “My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in. I’m like a Syrian bow.” He ended the poem: “I am not in the right place — I am not a painter.”

The ceiling contains the Creation of Adam, the most reproduced image in Western art — God and Adam reaching toward each other across a gap of space that contains everything humanity has ever believed about the relationship between the divine and the human. It was unveiled in 1512. Julius II wept.

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The Last Judgment and the Scandal of Nudity

More than two decades later, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel. Pope Clement VII had commissioned him to paint the altar wall, a project continued by his successor Paul III. The Last Judgment, completed in 1541, covers the entire altar wall in a composition of over 300 figures — most of them nude — organized around the central figure of Christ as judge, his arm raised in condemnation. It is not a calm or reassuring image. It is terrifying.

The nudity caused immediate scandal. Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of ceremonies, complained to the pope that the work was indecent. Michelangelo painted him into the fresco as Minos, the judge of the underworld, with serpents biting his genitals. When Biagio appealed to the pope for his removal, Paul III reportedly said his jurisdiction did not extend to hell.

In 1564 — the year Michelangelo died — the Church passed a censorship law requiring that the nudity in the Last Judgment be covered with painted draperies. The painter Daniele da Volterra was commissioned to do the work, earning himself the nickname il braghettone — the breeches maker. The censorship was partially reversed in later restorations.

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Architecture: St. Peter’s Dome

In 1546, Pope Paul III appointed Michelangelo chief architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, at the age of seventy-one. He refused payment, describing the project as an act of devotion to God rather than a commission. His design for the dome — a double-shell structure that rises 136 meters above the floor of the basilica and dominates the Roman skyline — became the most influential dome in Western architecture, directly inspiring the domes of the Panthéon in Paris, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the United States Capitol. He did not live to see it completed. Work was still ongoing at his death and the dome was finished by Giacomo della Porta in 1590.

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Last Years and Death

The last sculptures of Michelangelo’s life are among the most arresting objects he ever made. The Rondanini Pietà, which he was still working on six days before his death, shows a Virgin and Christ stripped of all idealization — the figures thin, elongated, almost merged into a single vertical form. It is the opposite of the perfect, polished Pietà of his youth. Whether it represents a stylistic evolution toward abstraction or the physical limitations of extreme old age — he was 88 — the debate has never been settled.

Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564, in Rome. He was initially buried in the Church of the Apostles in Rome, but his body was smuggled out of the city by his nephew and transported to Florence, where Giorgio Vasari designed his tomb in the Basilica di Santa Croce. He is buried there still, in the company of Dante, Galileo, and Machiavelli.

He was the only artist of the Renaissance of whom it was claimed in his lifetime that he surpassed antiquity. That claim has never seriously been challenged.

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Key Facts

Detail	Information
Born	March 6, 1475, Caprese, Tuscany
Died	February 18, 1564, Rome
Full name	Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Primary discipline	Sculpture (self-identified); also painter, architect, poet
Key sculptures	Pietà (1498–99), David (1501–04), Moses (c.1513–15), Rondanini Pietà (unfinished, 1552–64)
Key paintings	Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–12), The Last Judgment (1536–41)
Major architecture	Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica (designed c.1546, completed 1590)
Patrons	Lorenzo de’ Medici; Popes Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, Paul III
Buried	Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence