Michelangelo: The Sculptor Who Didn't Want to Paint a Ceiling

He was born in Caprese, where his father was briefly a local administrator, into a Florentine family of minor nobility that had lost its fortune. Becoming an artist was a step down. At 13 he was apprenticed to Florence's leading painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio, for three years, but left after one, having, as Condivi tells it, nothing more to learn.¹

Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of the city, took him under his wing. Above all, the young sculptor had access to the Medici collection, dominated by fragments of ancient Roman statues.¹

The Pietà, commissioned in 1498 by a French cardinal, set him a rare challenge: carving two figures, the Virgin and the dead Christ, from a single block. He made them one dense, compact mass, while playing on the contrasts of male and female, clothed and naked, dead and alive.¹

The David, commissioned in 1501 for Florence Cathedral, was carved from a block left unfinished some 40 years earlier. A subtle S-curve makes the giant look alive. The statue was so admired that, instead of the cathedral roof, it was placed in front of the city hall as a symbol of the Florentine Republic. The original is now in the Galleria dell'Accademia.¹

The round Holy Family, painted for the Doni family, is the only easel painting by Michelangelo.¹ Its interlocking figures betray his fascination with Leonardo, who had returned to Florence in 1500. Michelangelo always denied that anyone influenced him, but scholars see Leonardo's work as the strongest outside influence on his art.¹

He kept his own voice, though, blending Leonardo's way of showing movement with his own sense of weight and strength.¹

In 1505 Pope Julius II called him to Rome to design his tomb: a freestanding monument on three levels, with perhaps as many as forty-seven large marble figures. The project kept being interrupted.² Instead, the pope gave him the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo found the first plan “a poor thing” and was allowed to design his own.³ Read the story in The Creation of Adam.

From late 1508, a few steps away, the young Raphael was painting the pope's private apartments for the same patron.