Michelangelo: A Guide to Michelangelo’s Life and Paintings
Written by MasterClass
Last updated: Sep 10, 2021 • 8 min read
Michelangelo is perhaps the most recognizable artist from the Italian Renaissance. His fresco painting of the Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and his monumental sculpture David have both been reproduced so frequently in contemporary visual culture that his art is synonymous with the Renaissance itself.
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Who Was Michelangelo?
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was a sculptor, painter, draftsman, architect, and poet of the Italian Renaissance. In his own time, Michelangelo was known as “Il Divino” (The Divine One) because his art seemingly embodied godly perfection. At the time, he was considered the greatest living artist. Today, he is still known as one of the greatest artists in history. Michelangelo made a significant impact on the history of western art, and the breadth of his virtuosic talents came to define the period of the High Renaissance.
He was notoriously guarded and secretive; there are stories of Michelangelo burning his own drawings to deny his peers access to his creative process. Unlike most artists during the Renaissance period, he did not run a traditional workshop where he produced work and simultaneously trained younger artists.
How Many Works Did Michelangelo Complete?
There are almost 200 known works (sculptures, paintings, and drawings) by Michelangelo. Judging from the number of sculptures he left unfinished, Michelangelo was a true perfectionist who frequently abandoned projects when he deemed them not up to his own standard. As he aged, the ambitiousness of his projects compounded, as well as the demand for more of his work from Popes, aristocrats, and princes. The projects that he did complete during his seventy-year-long career can be held up as the best examples of artistic creation from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
A Brief History of Michelangelo’s Life
Michelangelo’s life and personality were mythologized by the biographies written about him during his lifetime by fellow artists Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, and through his surviving letters and poetry.
- Florentine training. Michelangelo was born in Caprese, a small town outside Florence, Italy. Michelangelo quickly moved to Florence and trained under the acclaimed sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and Donatello. In his early teens, he also entered the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, the most prominent painter in Florence at the time. Later in his life, Michelangelo claimed that his own genius and artistry was a god-given gift, and not something that could be attributed to the tutelage from other artists. (He is quoted as saying, “Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.”)
- Medici patronage. Early in his career Michelangelo received commissions from the powerful Medici family. Michelangelo was invited by Lorenzo de’ Medici to join the Medici household, and to study the collection of ancient sculptures the Medicis had amassed and displayed in the garden of their property in Florence. This attention from the Medici was likely due in part to Michelangelo’s masters, who had their own connections and relationships with the ruling family. During this time Michelangelo produced reliefs including The Madonna of the Stairs (c. 1491) and The Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492). Michelangelo left Florence before the Medicis fell from power in 1494, staying briefly in Venice and then Bologna and Rome, where he sculpted Bacchus (1496–97), the piece that led to his first public commission.
- First public commission. At twenty-three years old, Michelangelo completed his first large-scale public commission: a sculpture of a Pietà for a French cardinal’s funerary chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The contract for the commission expressly stated that the sculpture should be the most beautiful sculpture in Rome. Rising to the occasion, the young Michelangelo delivered a technical tour de force.
- David. Not long after he had completed the Pietà, Michelangelo was commissioned to create a sculpture of the biblical hero David that would be displayed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Ambitiously, he went about the task of carving the sculpture from a monumental block of marble from the quarries in Carrara. The block (nicknamed ll Gigante, or ‘the giant’ for its outrageous scale) was already a decade old, and another artist had roughed out the initial proportions and pose of the figure before abandoning the project. These elements limited the ways in which Michelangelo could revise the composition. The project took over four years, and was likely completed while the artist was still twenty-nine years old.
- Later years. In 1534, Michelangelo left Florence for Rome, where he would spend the rest of his life. In his later years, Michelangelo produced less sculptures, and more poetry, paintings, and architectural designs, including the Medici Chapel, the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, and the Laurentian Library. He died in 1564 at the age of 88.
What Made Michelangelo a Renaissance Artist?
Michelangelo is considered the quintessential Renaissance artist, exemplifying many of the period’s ideals.
- Training in Florence. Michelangelo grew up and received his artistic training in Florence, the epicenter of cultural activity and artistic production on the Italian peninsula. The young artist was surrounded by some of the best examples of painting and sculpture created during the Early Renaissance in the 1470s through 1490s.
- Improving on his predecessors. Michelangelo’s art uses the tools introduced during the Early Renaissance and takes them to the next level. The figures in his paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are in dynamically complex poses and move gracefully through a believably three-dimensional space. The poses and stature of his highly finished sculpture faithfully and naturalistically imitate the human form with a degree of reverence. This spirit of improvement embodies the energy of the Renaissance.
- Drawing. Drawing, or disegno, was an essential part of Michelangelo’s process. Sketching the male nude was an important aspect of his art-making shared by many Renaissance artists.
- Mastering the human form. Michelangelo had a profound knowledge of the human form and was able to masterfully reproduce it in the medium of painting, drawing, and sculpture. He is said to have studied cadavers by candlelight in order to learn more about human anatomy. During his stays in Rome, he studied the surviving classical sculptures and the ruins of ancient architecture.
- Renaissance man. Michelangelo was a polymath who worked in a diverse range of media at an extremely high technical proficiency. He produced masterfully rendered drawings on paper, carved monumental sculptures, painted dramatic frescoes, and designed the architecture of Laurentian Library in Florence and dome of New St. Peter’s Basilica. In the earliest biographies of artists from this era, Michelangelo’s work is often considered as the climax of the Italian Renaissance.
Michelangelo’s Lasting Influence
Many scholars credit Michelangelo’s work as achieving a type of visual perfection that could not be topped or refined. His work, along with that of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, defined the period of the High Renaissance. So where did that leave the generation of artists that followed Michelangelo?
Since they couldn’t compete with perfection, Michelangelo’s successors developed a new manner of painting, called Mannerism. Mannerism placed a renewed emphasis on the virtuosity of the artist, like in the case of Jacopo Pontormo, Parmigianino, and Agnolo Bronzino. Rather than creating proportional, elegant figures occupying convincingly deep space as in the work of Michelangelo, artists chose to unnaturally elongate their figures proportions, complicating the appearance of the human body. The color palettes of their paintings are much more vibrant, and their compositions more complex, so that the eye of the viewer does not rest. This shift in the style of visual art is partially indebted to Michelangelo’s body of work, and the changing culture surrounding these artists.
4 Famous Works of Art by Michelangelo
During his prolific career, Michelangelo produced several works that rank among the best known in the world.
- 1. Sistine Chapel frescoes (1508–1512): In 1508 Michelangelo traveled to the Vatican at the request of Pope Paul III to begin work on one of the most ambitious fresco series of all time. The ceilings of the Sistine chapel feature Michelangelo's depictions of The Creation of Adam from Genesis, while the wall of the Sistine Chapel is home to an altar decorated with The Last Judgment.
- 2. Study for the Libyan Sibyl (1510–1511). One of the best-preserved of the surviving drawings by Michelangelo, this piece was originally a study for a figure painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
- 3. David (1501–1504). Michelangelo’s sculpture of David is one of the most monumental sculptures ever carved from a single block of marble. In a bid to outdo his predecessors (including all of the ancient Greek and Roman sculptors) and further display his virtuosity, he created perhaps the most highly finished sculpture of the sixteenth century. David is Michelangelo’s fully realized, ideal image of mankind.
- 4. Pietà (1499). This was Michelangelo’s first public commission, and the sculpture that established his reputation in Rome. Michelangelo demonstrates his technical skill as a sculptor through the polished surface, complex gathering of drapery, the way in which he suggests the heaviness of Christ’s limp body, and the inclusion of virtuosic details like the distended veins in Christ’s arm. As a means of establishing his own presence in the competitive artistic environment of Rome, Michelangelo’s Pietà drew upon religious iconography from the northern European tradition, which was unprecedented in Italian sculpture at the time. The work of art depicts a moment from the Passion scene when the Virgin Mary cradles Christ’s lifeless body following the Crucifixion, her pose evokes Christ’s birth and death in a single image which is critical for the theological redemption narrative. As the story goes, when the sculpture was finally displayed in St. Peter’s, Michelangelo overheard a gathered crowd of pilgrims incorrectly attributed the sculpture to another artist. He snuck back into St. Peter’s later that night and carved his signature into the band draped around the Virgin’s torso, declaring his authorship of the sculpture for all to see. It is the only sculpture he ever signed.
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