Michelangelo had been on his back for 20 months, resting sparingly, and sleeping in his clothes to save time. When it was all over, however, in the fall of 1512, the masterpiece that he left behind on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome would leave the world forever altered.
Born in 1475 to an impoverished but aristocratic family in Caprese, a hillside town near Florence, Michelangelo Buonarroti grew up with an innate sense of pride, which as he aged, would feed his volatile temperament. When he failed to excel at school, his father apprenticed him to Domenico Ghirlandaio, a Florentine frescoist. Cocky from the start, the 13-year-old Michelangelo succeeded in irritating his fellow apprentices, one so badly that the boy punched him in the face, breaking his nose. But in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, Michelangelo learned to paint; in doing so, he caught the attention of Florence’s storied Medici family, whose wealth and political standing would soon put Michelangelo on the map as an artist and, in 1496, chart his course south, to Rome.
“It’s almost as if Michelangelo goes from zero to 65 miles per hour in a second or two,” says William Wallace, an art history professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. “He was 21 when he arrived in Rome, and he hadn’t accomplished a lot yet. He went from relatively small works to suddenly creating the Pietà.”
It was the Rome Pietà (1499), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of her son Jesus in her lap, and the artist’s next creation in Florence, the nearly 17-foot-tall figure of David (1504) that earned Michelangelo the respect of the greatest art patron of his age: Pope Julius II. The 10-year partnership between the two men was both a meeting of the minds and a constant war of egos and would result in some of the Italian Renaissance’s greatest works of art and architecture, the Sistine Chapel among them. Continue reading
Sources
- Smithsonian.com
- Image: Sistine Chapel