Good morning! Some artists become so famous and their work so well known that it gets hard to still imagine them as real people. Like, with birthdays and everything. Nevertheless, today is Michelangelo’s birthday.
His full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, and he was born in the Republic of Florence in 1475, in the village of Caprese. Nowadays the place is called Caprese Michelangelo. His father was a government administrator, and his mother, who had suffered from poor health for years, died when he was six. After that Michelangelo was raised by his nanny and her husband, who was a stonecutter and owned a marble quarry. That was where, at a very early age, he began to learn how to work with marble.
He was not much of a student at school, ignoring the grammar he was supposed to be studying to copy paintings and find painters to hang out with. There were plenty of those around, because at the time Florence was a leading center of art. It was a wealthy city, and many of the rich merchants and bankers (including the Medici family) became patrons of the best artists. While Michelangelo was still a boy, a team of painters from Florence was summoned to Rome to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel. One of them was Comenico Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo became an apprentice when he was 13. His apprenticeship lasted only one year, after which Ghirlandaio paid him as a full artist. Then the next year, when Michelangelo was 15, the ruler of Florence (Lorenzo de Medici) asked Ghirlanaio for his two best students, and one of them was Michelangelo.
Medici had requested the best art students in order to enroll them in the Platonic Academy, a sort of elite university Medici had founded. There Michelangelo met and worked with some of the top philosophers, writers, and artists of the time. He also sculpted the Madonna of the Stairs when he was about 17; it’s his earliest known sculpture. If you look at portraits of Michelangelo from later in life, you’ll notice that his nose is slightly disfigured — that came from those years too; he got in a fight with another student, who punched him in the nose.
He relocated to Rome when he was 21, and when he was just 24 sculpted one of his masterpieces, the Pieta. You can still visit in in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Then he returned to Florence, and was hired to complete a huge statue that had been started 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio. He completed it, all right — it’s now another of his masterpieces, David.
Michelangelo’s reputation was already enormous, and he received commissions from any number of rich and noble folks and organizations. And remember those painters from Florence who had worked on the Sistine Chapel? They’d done the walls, but not the ceiling. And in 1508 Michelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to do it. It took four years. The back story is that a rival, Donato Bramante, was working for the Pope on St. Peter’s Basilica, and talked the Pope into giving Michelangelo the commission because he hoped Michelangelo would fail. He’d never worked in fresco, after all, and how good could his first attempt in an unfamiliar medium be? The plan did not work out the way Bramante hoped.
In his personal life, Michelangelo lived austerely. He had become quite wealthy, but his biographer described him this way: “His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.” And that’s one more point about Michelangelo: he was the first European artist whose biography was published during his lifetime. Not once, either; three different biographies were published.
None of the biographies mentions any personal relationships Michelangelo ever had. He certainly never married, and it seems he never had any close relationships, companions or even friends. What he did have was rivalries and feuds, always with other artists. in particular Raphael. He also carried on a long correspondence with Vittoria Colonna, a wealthy widow and member of the nobility. But other than exchanging letters, they weren’t otherwise involved, and most of their writings were about abstract things like social and spiritual topics.
Michelangelo lived to be 88, and passed away in Rome. He’s buried in Florence, at his request. He had outlived all of his rivals by that time, and is still one of a handful of Western artists that everybody seems to be familiar with.
