Who was Michelangelo?

Lorenzo de' Medici's death in 1492 ended Michelangelo's place at court, and political turmoil in Florence, including the rise of the preacher Savonarola and the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, sent him traveling to Venice and then Bologna. There he studied the relief carvings of Jacopo della Quercia and completed small commissioned figures for the Shrine of St. Dominic. Returning briefly to Florence, he carved a sleeping Cupid that was sold in Rome disguised as an ancient sculpture; when the buyer, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, discovered the deception he was impressed enough by the workmanship to invite Michelangelo to Rome, where he arrived in 1496 at the age of twenty-one.

In Rome he carved a statue of Bacchus for Cardinal Riario, which the cardinal ultimately rejected, and then, in 1497, received a commission from a French cardinal for a Pietà depicting the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Christ. Completed when Michelangelo was twenty-four, the sculpture was immediately recognized as extraordinary, with Vasari calling it a near miracle that shapeless stone could be reduced to such perfection. It remains the only work Michelangelo ever signed, his name carved into the sash across Mary's chest, and it now stands in St Peter's Basilica.

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499 as the political climate shifted again following Savonarola's execution. The Guild of Wool commissioned him to finish a colossal marble figure of David that had sat unfinished for forty years, and by 1504 he had produced the statue that made his reputation as a sculptor of unmatched technical skill. A panel of the city's leading artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, was convened to decide where it should stand, ultimately choosing the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.

In 1505 Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome to build an enormous papal tomb featuring forty statues, a project meant to take five years but which dragged on for four decades amid constant interruptions and, eventually, disputes between the two strong-willed men. The tomb was never finished as originally planned; it now stands in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, notable chiefly for the finished figure of Moses, completed in 1516, along with two unfinished slave figures now housed in the Louvre.

According to his biographer Condivi, the architect Bramante, resentful of Michelangelo's standing, urged Julius to assign him a medium in which he had little experience, hoping he would fail. The result was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1508 and 1512, covering more than 500 square meters with over 300 figures. Rather than the twelve apostles originally requested, Michelangelo persuaded the pope to let him design a far more ambitious scheme depicting scenes from Genesis, including the widely reproduced Creation of Adam, framed by prophets and sibyls who foretold the coming of Christ.

Decades later, Pope Clement VII commissioned a second major fresco from Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, painted on the altar wall of the same chapel between 1534 and 1541 under Clement's successor, Paul III. The work depicted Christ and the souls of the dead with a physical, muscular intensity that struck many contemporaries as scandalous for its nudity; church authorities later ordered the figures partially covered, a task carried out after Michelangelo's death by his former apprentice Daniele da Volterra.

Between his Roman commissions, Michelangelo remained tied to Florence and its ruling Medici family. He designed the Medici Chapel at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, housing tombs adorned with allegorical figures of Night, Day, Dusk, and Dawn, and later designed the Laurentian Library, whose dramatic staircase and inventive use of columns anticipated the Baroque style. When Florentine citizens expelled the Medici and restored the republic in 1527, Michelangelo helped fortify the city, and after its fall to a siege in 1530 he was briefly condemned to death by the Medici pope Clement VII before being pardoned and allowed to keep working.

In his final decades Michelangelo settled permanently in Rome, where in 1546 he was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica, succeeding a line of architects who had struggled to advance the project for fifty years. He revived and strengthened Bramante's original centralized plan and designed the basilica's dome, which was not completed until after his death but became renowned as one of the defining achievements of Renaissance architecture. Alongside this he designed the Capitoline Hill piazza, the upper floor of the Palazzo Farnese, and several churches, including Santa Maria degli Angeli.

Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose religious devotion deepened with age, and he wrote several hundred sonnets and madrigals, some addressed to the Roman nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri and others to the poet Vittoria Colonna, with whom he shared a close friendship until her death in 1547. He continued working almost until the end, carving the unfinished Rondanini Pietà only days before he died in Rome on 18 February 1564, at the age of eighty-eight. Honoring his wish to be buried in Florence, his body was later interred at the Basilica of Santa Croce beneath a tomb commissioned from Vasari and funded partly by Cosimo I de' Medici.