Michelangelo: Seeing the Angel Inside the Marble
A boy who preferred sketching frescoes to grammar lessons would grow up to reshape the ceiling of the Christian world — with his own hands, alone, for four years.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, a small town near Arezzo in Tuscany, to a family of failed Florentine bankers. His father Ludovico was serving as the town's judicial administrator when Michelangelo arrived; within months the family returned to Florence. His mother, Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena, fell ill and died in 1481, when Michelangelo was six. During her illness and after, the boy lived with a nanny and her husband, a stonecutter, in Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry. It was there, among chisels and stone dust, that he first fell in love with marble.
Sent to Florence to study grammar under the humanist Francesco da Urbino, Michelangelo showed little patience for his lessons. He preferred copying the frescoes of the city's churches and seeking out painters instead. Florence at that time was Italy's great engine of art and learning, funded by the Signoria, the guilds, and patrons like the Medici. Michelangelo studied and copied works by Giotto and Masaccio, and admired Ghiberti's bronze doors on the Baptistry, which he later called 'The Gates of Paradise.'
In 1488, at thirteen, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, master of fresco and perspective, whose workshop was the largest in Florence. His father convinced Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist — unusual for someone so young. The following year, Lorenzo de' Medici, de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils; Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo studied at the Medici's Platonic Academy, absorbing ideas from humanist thinkers of the age, including Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
Fame came astonishingly early. Two of his most celebrated works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. He was just 26 when he carved David from a five-and-a-half-metre block of marble; the young sculptor built a shed beside the stone and worked largely alone, often through the night, until the Renaissance masterpiece emerged.
In 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo for one of the defining works of Western art: the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Beginning three years later, he spent nearly four years covering 520 square metres, painting nine panels inspired by Genesis — Adam, Eve, and Noah's flood — surrounded by mythological figures. The panel known as the Creation of Adam remains one of the most iconic images in Western painting.
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