Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor but became one of the great architects of the Renaissance. He shaped the dome of St Peter’s, the Campidoglio in Rome and the Laurentian Library in Florence, where he broke the classical rules and opened the way to the Baroque.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in Caprese in Tuscany and grew up in Florence. He was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and then lived in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household, where he studied ancient sculpture and got to know the humanists. As a young sculptor he made the Pietà in St Peter’s and the David in Florence, and in 1508–1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He came to architecture relatively late, through commissions for the Medici family in Florence in the 1510s and 1520s. He moved to Rome in 1534 and stayed there for the rest of his life.
In Florence he designed the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo and the Laurentian Library, where the recessed columns and flowing staircase of the vestibule turned the classical rules upside down. In Rome he gave the Capitol a new form, with an oval piazza and palaces in which giant pilasters run through two storeys. He completed the Palazzo Farnese after Sangallo, with its powerful cornice. From 1547 he was in charge of building St Peter’s and returned to Bramante’s central plan but made it more massive. The great dome was completed after his death by Giacomo della Porta. He also designed the Porta Pia and converted the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564 and was buried in Florence. He treated the wall as a body, full of tension and movement, and that would influence the architects of the Baroque, above all Bernini and Borromini. The giant pilaster running through several storeys became a common device in Europe, including in Swedish palaces and town houses of the age of greatness. The dome of St Peter’s became the model for the Dôme des Invalides in Paris, St Paul’s in London and the Capitol in Washington. His life was recorded by his contemporaries, in the biographies by Vasari and Condivi, and he became the image of the artist as genius.