Michelangelo Buonarroti
1475–1564 — Florentine / Roman Renaissance painter
Sculptor of paint, architect of bodies.
The painter of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and one of the defining figures of the High Renaissance.
Life
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on the sixth of March, 1475, in the small town of Caprese in the Florentine hinterland. He was raised in Florence, entered the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio at around thirteen, and quickly came to the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici, in whose household he received an education in classical art, Neoplatonic philosophy, and humanist letters that shaped the intellectual ambitions of his entire career.
By his own account and by universal agreement, Michelangelo was above all a sculptor. He considered the Sistine Chapel commission — Pope Julius II's demand that he paint the ceiling of the chapel in the Vatican, delivered in 1508 — an unwelcome imposition on a man who had devoted his creative life to the liberation of figures from marble. What he produced in four years of almost continuous labour was, instead, the most ambitious and consequential ceiling painting ever made.
The ceiling covers nine central scenes from Genesis, surrounded by prophets and sibyls and populated throughout by the ignudi — idealised athletic nude figures — whose bodies became the defining image of the High Renaissance figure. In 1536 Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall, completing the decorative programme with a vision of divine justice that abandoned all of the classicism of the earlier work in favour of a compressed, tormented, physically overwhelming image.
Major paintings
The major paintings of Michelangelo span the full range of High Renaissance art — from early works in the Florentine / Roman tradition to the mature style that defined his period.