Michelangelo Buonarroti
The sculptor who also painted the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo saw himself first and foremost as a sculptor, but he painted the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel and designed the dome of St Peter’s. His figures are muscular and full of inner force.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese in Tuscany but grew up in Florence. His father was an official of minor nobility who did not want his son to become an artist. Even so, at thirteen he was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Shortly afterwards he was taken into Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, where he studied ancient sculpture and met humanist philosophers.
His breakthrough came in Rome with the Pietà in St Peter’s, made in 1498–99. It shows the Virgin with the dead Christ in her lap and is the only work he signed. Back in Florence, in 1501–04, he carved David from a block of marble that others had given up on. The statue is over five metres tall and now stands in the Galleria dell’Accademia. In 1505 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to make his tomb. The project was scaled down and dragged on for forty years, and he himself called it a tragedy. The mighty Moses forms part of the final tomb in San Pietro in Vincoli.
Against his will, in 1508–12 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with the Creation, the Fall and the Flood, prophets and sibyls. The Creation of Adam has become one of the most famous images in the world. More than twenty years later, in 1536–41, he painted The Last Judgement on the chapel’s altar wall. He also worked as an architect. He designed the Medici Chapel and the library at San Lorenzo in Florence, the square on the Capitoline Hill in Rome and, from 1546, St Peter’s, whose dome was completed after his death.
For Michelangelo the human body was the supreme expression of the soul. His figures are muscular, twisting and charged with power. He believed that the sculpture lay hidden in the stone and had to be set free. He was temperamental and suspicious and mostly worked alone. He also wrote poems, including some to his friends Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. He never married. He died in Rome in 1564, almost 89 years old, and was buried in Florence.
Even in his lifetime he was called “the divine”, and two biographies of him were written while he was still alive. He changed the view of the artist as a genius and had a profound influence on Mannerism and the Baroque.