Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, near Arezzo, in the territory of the Florentine Republic, where his father Ludovico Buonarroti was serving as a local magistrate. The family had been small-scale Florentine bankers, and his mother died in 1481, when he was six. In 1488, aged thirteen, he was apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, and the following year he passed into the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici, where sculpture came to occupy him more and more. His Roman Pietà (about 1498-1499) and the marble David (1501-1504) made him famous before he was thirty. In 1505 Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome, and the decades that followed shuttled him between Florence and Rome, between tombs, frescoes and buildings. In 1546 he was appointed architect of St Peter's. He died in Rome on 18 February 1564, aged eighty-eight.

Michelangelo saw himself first as a sculptor, yet painting carries a large part of his fame. His early panels are unfinished: the Manchester Madonna and The Entombment (about 1500-1501, National Gallery, London), an altarpiece left incomplete when he returned to Florence in 1501. The Doni Tondo (about 1505-1506, Uffizi, Florence), painted for the merchant Agnolo Doni, is the only finished panel painting of his that survives, and it is conceived almost as a sculpture, with the Holy Family twisted into one compact, rounded group. From 1508 to 1512 he painted the vault of the Sistine Chapel for Julius II: nine scenes from Genesis, framed by prophets, sibyls and nude youths. Between 1536 and 1541 he covered the chapel's altar wall with The Last Judgment (Sistine Chapel, Vatican), and his last frescoes, in the Pauline Chapel, were completed in 1550.

Michelangelo took few pupils, and his workshop never became a school in the manner of Raphael's. His influence travelled through his works and through two biographies written in his lifetime, Vasari's Lives (1550) and Ascanio Condivi's Life (1553), the latter prepared with his participation. After his death the nudes of The Last Judgment were partly covered by Daniele da Volterra, who earned the nickname "Il Braghettone", and the Sistine frescoes were cleaned in a restoration that ran from 1980 to 1994. For a painter working in oil, this body of work is a lesson in modelling: bodies built like carved volumes, light travelling across muscle and drapery, and colour stated firmly enough to hold its place against that sculptural drawing.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.