Michelangelo: Life, Works, and Artistic Legacy

Introduction: A Renaissance Genius Without Equal

Michelangelo was the greatest sculptor of the sixteenth century and one of the greatest of all history. Incredibly, considering the number of years required to master a craft, he was also one of the greatest painters, architects, and poets. There have been few artists who have been as prolific, and fewer still who created enduring masterpieces in so many different media. Michelangelo would have secured his place in history had he only carved the David, or painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or erected St. Peter's—each a central achievement in the history of human endeavor. Yet he accomplished all three, and thus his creative genius remains unmatched in ancient or modern times.

During the period from 1500 to 1508, Michelangelo accepted eighteen different commissions, ranging from a bronze dagger to a tomb for Pope Julius II, from statuettes for the Piccolomini altar in Siena to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Completed works include nine marble sculptures—among them the colossal David, the Bruges Madonna, and St. Matthew—two marble tondi, four figures for the Piccolomini altar, three works in bronze (all since lost), at least one painting (the Doni Tondo), and the cartoon for the Battle of Cascina.

With each successive pope, Michelangelo's position as architect of St. Peter's was confirmed, while he continued to accept additional responsibilities from popes and select patrons. During the reign of Pius IV, he designed the Porta Pia, transformed the Baths of Diocletian into the Christian church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and designed the Sforza Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore. Throughout this period, Michelangelo continued to privately explore his personal faith through poetry, drawings, and sculpture, while also building a considerable personal fortune through shrewd investments and management. He completed just three sculptures during the last thirty years of his life—the Rachel and Leah for the tomb of Julius II, and the bust of Brutus—as architecture now dominated his time and perhaps became his most influential legacy.

Early Life, Training, and the Medici Circle

Born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a small town in rural Tuscany, Michelangelo was the son of Ludovico Buonarroti, a minor official and local governor. After Ludovico's six-month term was over, he moved the family to a large farm in the village of Settignano overlooking Florence, where the hills were dotted with quarries and gave the young Michelangelo his first exposure to stone carving. Ludovico expected his son to enter the world of finance, considering art a manual craft of lowly occupation. However, after a battle of wills, Michelangelo was allowed to apprentice with Domenico Ghirlandaio, who ran an impressive workshop in Florence. This is where Michelangelo learned drawing and painting in both tempera and fresco.

He was soon placed with the Medici family, the de facto rulers of Florence and the greatest art patrons of the Renaissance. Here, among writers, musicians, scholars, artists, and the most learned men of the century, he gained a proper education and made invaluable contacts. While carving, Michelangelo evidently thought a great deal about poetry as well—poems were found scribbled on sheets in his workshop, demonstrating how easily he moved between the two media: "the rhythmic strokes of the hammer suggested verse, his verse retained elements of its lapidary origins," creating an exalted vision that "drove the sculptor's arm, and a spiritual meaning lay beyond the sweat."

Upstairs in one of the five houses Michelangelo bought on Via Ghibellina, a historic street in the center of Florence, can be found the Madonna della Scala (1491), a delicate, shallow relief carved when he was about sixteen years old—his earliest surviving work. Nearby is the Battle of the Centaurs (1492). In the Casa Buonarroti is a small-scale model of the wooden contraption used to move the David, the eighteen-foot-tall statue that Michelangelo worked on in the Opera del Duomo and completed in a little over two years at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Major Sculptures and Works in Florence

He depicts David in a relaxed but alert pose at the instant before his battle with Goliath, holding a stone in his right hand and a sling in his left, gazing in concentration. The piece was designed to top the cathedral, but city officials wanted a more visible location, so in 1504 the statue was moved from the Opera del Duomo to the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall, "as a symbol of civic pride and Florence's struggle against tyranny as a small but independent city-state." It took forty men four days to transport the statue along fourteen greased beams to the Piazza, where it remained for more than three centuries, until 1874, when—in an effort to protect it from the weather—it was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia. A special wooden crate, the scale model of which can be seen in the Casa Buonarroti, was used for this move; the statue's fifteen-minute walk took five days to complete, with workers rolling it along tracks from 4 a.m. to 11 a.m. to avoid the summer heat. A replica still stands in the Piazza della Signoria (Piazza Vecchio), and another stands above the city at Piazzale Michelangelo, facing the Arno River and Ponte Vecchio.

The Museo del Bargello houses several of Michelangelo's works, including Bacchus, the ancient god of wine, which Michelangelo sculpted for the banker Jacopo Galli in 1496. The statue seems "a bit off balance, like a drunk person, since Bacchus supports himself on his left foot only," while a small satyr hovers behind him.

The Tondo Pitti, a relief completed in 1503, depicts the Virgin and Child; on the Virgin's forehead is a cherub with wings unfolded, "which perhaps refers to the gift of prophecy." Also in the Bargello is a work sometimes called David-Apollo—because past observers disagreed about its subject—as well as a bust of Brutus, which the artist made at the age of sixty-three, evidencing his enduring interest in ancient art.

The Uffizi, one of the most famous museums in the world, houses Michelangelo's only painting in Florence. The painting, framed in dazzling gold, shows the Holy Family with Saint John as an infant and is called the Tondo Doni "because it was created for Agnolo Doni's marriage to Maddalena Strozzi." The Galleria dell'Accademia, where the David is housed, also holds his La Pietà, a sculpture he completed at seventy-five years of age, which depicts Nicodemus as a hooded figure holding Jesus and Mary, "whose face bears a striking resemblance to portraits of Michelangelo himself." The Medici Chapel houses Night, Day, and numerous other works.

Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564, two weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday and the same year Galileo and Shakespeare were born. Despite health problems, he had continued to work as an architect and urban planner into his eighties, taking great interest in the business and personal affairs of his nephew while maintaining regular correspondence with family, friends, admirers, and patrons. He was still carving the Rondanini Pietà just a few days before his death. He lived through the reigns of thirteen popes and worked for nine of them, and for most of his life lived with one or two assistants, a male secretary, and a female housekeeper. Although he never married—which was not uncommon among Renaissance artists—he formed lasting attachments with a few friends and was committed to his immediate and extended family. Sadly, he outlived most of them. It is said that he was completely devastated by the death of his faithful servant and companion of twenty-five years, Urbino, and that he provided for Urbino's widow and child.

The Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the Julius Tomb

For instance, the artist's Last Judgment is described as no less than the image of the "true judgment" and the "true resurrection" of the body, willed by God himself to men "so that they will see what fate does when supreme intellects descend to earth infused with grace and with the divine wisdom."

In 2002, Sir Timothy Clifford, an Italian Renaissance scholar, was searching through a back room of a Smithsonian facility when he came upon a box labeled "lighting fixtures." When he opened it, he found a chalk-and-wash drawing of a large decorative candlestick that he immediately recognized as a work by Michelangelo. Clifford explained, "You recognize a Michelangelo as you recognize a friend." The drawing, appraised at more than $10 million, had been sitting in a box containing several pieces by unknown Italian artists and had been purchased by the museum some sixty years earlier for $60.

Although Michelangelo initially turned down the commission, the mutual regard he and Julius II shared soon persuaded him, and by October 31, 1512, he had painted over three hundred figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He had begun the preparatory designs in May 1508, yet it was the fall before he actually started painting. Dissatisfied with early results, he removed all that had been painted and, in January 1509, began again. As his biographer Condivi recalls, "as a result of having painted for so long a time, keeping his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he saw little when he looked down; if he had to read a letter or some other small thing, he was obliged to hold it above his head." So physically and emotionally torturous was the project that the artist recounted its effect on him: "After four tortured years, more than 400 over life-sized figures, I felt as old and as weary as Jeremiah. I was only 37, yet friends did not recognize the old man I had become."

Working high above the chapel floor on scaffolding, Michelangelo painted, between 1508 and 1512, some of the finest pictorial images of all time. On the vault of the papal chapel, he devised an intricate system of decoration that included nine scenes from the Book of Genesis, beginning with God Separating Light from Darkness and including the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Temptation and Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Flood. These centrally located narratives are surrounded by alternating images of prophets and sibyls—Libyan, Erythraean—on marble thrones, by other Old Testament subjects, and by the ancestors of Christ. In order to prepare for this enormous work, Michelangelo drew numerous figure studies and cartoons, devising scores of figure types and poses. These awesome, mighty images, demonstrating his masterly understanding of human anatomy and movement, changed the course of painting in the West.

Before the Sistine commission in 1505, Julius II had commissioned Michelangelo to produce his tomb—intended to be the most magnificent of Christian times and to be located in the new Basilica of St. Peter's, then under construction. The project was to include more than forty figures, and Michelangelo spent months in the quarries to obtain the necessary Carrara marble. However, due to financial problems, the pope ordered him to stop work on the tomb and begin painting the Sistine ceiling. When work on the tomb resumed, it was redesigned to a more modest scale, yet Michelangelo "made some of his finest sculpture for the Julius Tomb, including the Moses, 1515—the muscular patriarch sits alertly in a shallow niche, holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments, his long beard entwined in his powerful hands." Two other statues, the Bound Slave and the Dying Slave (1510–1513), demonstrate the artist's approach to carving: "he conceived of the figure as being imprisoned in the block…By removing the excess stone, the form was released."