Renaissance
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
Italian High Renaissance painter.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was the defining figure of the High Renaissance and, for his contemporaries, the living proof that an artist could be a universal intellect rather than a hired craftsman. Trained in Florence under Ghirlandaio and in the Medici sculpture garden, he thought of himself first as a sculptor of marble, yet he reshaped painting and architecture with equal authority. His David (1501–1504) recast a civic symbol as heroic nude on a colossal scale; his Pietà in St. Peter's had already, before he was twenty-five, achieved a polish and tenderness that made his reputation in Rome.
Between 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel almost single-handed, inventing a fictive architecture peopled by prophets, sibyls, and the great scenes of Genesis, the Creation of Adam among them. Returning to the chapel decades later, he covered its altar wall with the Last Judgment (1536–1541), a churning vision of resurrection and damnation whose muscular nudity provoked both awe and censure. Across a career of nearly seventy working years he served a line of popes, quarreled with patrons, and wrote hundreds of poems.
He was the first European artist to be the subject of two biographies in his own lifetime — by Vasari and by his pupil Ascanio Condivi — and the reverent title 'il divino' attached to him early. He died in Rome in 1564, still at work, and was buried in Florence at Santa Croce.
The words the record keeps using: heroic, sublime, tormented, grand, muscular, visionary, austere, titanic.
At a glance
- Lived 1475–1564
- Origin Italian (Florentine)
- Worked in Florence, Rome
- Era Renaissance
- Movements High Renaissance
- Mediums Fresco, Marble sculpture
- Techniques Buon fresco, Chiaroscuro
Works in the archive
- Pietà, 1498 (St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City)
Carved before Michelangelo was twenty-five for a French cardinal's tomb chapel, the Pietà shows the dead Christ across the lap of a Virgin whose youthful serenity troubled and moved his contemporaries. It is the only… - David, 1501 (Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence)
Carved from a tall, previously abandoned block of Carrara marble, the David depicts the biblical hero not in triumph but in the taut instant before combat, sling over his shoulder and gaze fixed on Goliath. Commissioned… - The Creation of Adam (Sistine Chapel ceiling), 1508 (Sistine Chapel, Vatican City)
The most celebrated panel of the Sistine ceiling shows God, borne on a billowing cloak crowded with figures, reaching toward the languid, newly formed Adam. The near-touch of the two index fingers has become the… - The Last Judgment, 1536 (Sistine Chapel, Vatican City)
Painted on the altar wall a quarter-century after the ceiling, the fresco shows Christ rising to judge as the resurrected swarm upward on the left and the damned are dragged down on the right. Its swirling mass of…
What was said
I' ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento
The finest sculptor conceives nothing that a single block of marble does not already contain within its excess; the hand that obeys the intellect only removes the surplus to release the figure.
According to his own pupil, Michelangelo held drawing (disegno) to be the foundation of painting, sculpture, and architecture alike, and worked from an exhaustive study of anatomy toward ideal form.
Lineage
Learned from Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Donatello
Passed on to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
What would Michelangelo make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Michelangelo Buonarroti", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Michelangelo · Keep a life moment the way Michelangelo would · Pictures made after Michelangelo