Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564, Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, b. Caprese, Tuscany.

Michelangelo was a towering figure of Renaissance, mannerist, and baroque art. After serving a year of apprenticeship to the painters Domenico Ghirlandaio and his brother David at Florence, Michelangelo entered (1489) the art school held in the Medici gardens under the directorship of Bertoldo (a pupil of Donatello). His early essays in sculpture attracted the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici, who took him to live in his household between 1490 and 1492. There he was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino. Drawings of this youthful period (now in the Louvre) attest to Michelangelo's study of works by Giotto and Masaccio, while the marble reliefs of the Madonna of the Stairs and Battle of Centaurs (Casa Buonarroti, Florence) show the influence of Donatello and of ancient Roman sarcophagi. He had occasion to study the reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia on the portal o f San Petronio, Bologna, when he executed statuettes for the shrine of San Domenico in the same church in 1494. At this time the apocalyptic vision of the fanatic monk Savonarola impressed the artist and was to fuse with his own tragic sense of human destiny later in his work.

Between 1496 and 1501, Michelangelo worked in Rome where he executed the marble Bacchus (Bargello, Florence) and the exquisitely balanced Pietà (St. Peter's, Rome), which was badly damaged by a madman wielding a hammer in 1972 and thereafter expertly restored. After returning to Florence in 1501, he was commissioned by the city to execute the magnificent giant David for the Piazza della Signoria, later moved into the Academy to protect it. The city asked him to paint, with Leonardo da Vinci, one of two frescoes for the council hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The cartoons (now lost) for these projected frescoes exerted enormous influence in their period. From these years date the marble Bruges Madonna (Notre Dame, Bruges) and the painted tondo of the Holy Family (Uffizi). In 1505 he was called to Rome to execute a sepulchral monument for Pope Julius II. This ,vas to become the most frustrating project of his life. As penance for a quarrel with the pope, Michelangelo spent more than a year creating a gigantic bronze portrait of Julius; it was shortly thereafter melted down for cannon. Soon after the contract for the tomb was awarded, Julius changed his mind in favor of the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine ceiling was executed between 1508 and 1512. In its profundity of spiritual content and sublimity of style it stands as one of the world's greatest masterpieces. A vast architectonic framework divides the ceiling into three superimposed zones. In the highest zone are nine panels with scenes from Genesis. Below are prophets and sibyls. In the lunettes and spandrels of the lowest zone are enigmatic scenes with groups of figures which have been variously identified as the ancestors of Christ or of the Virgin and which seem to suggest a vision of primordial humanity.

After the death of Julius II, the heirs again contracted for the execution of his monument, and litigations dragged on some 30 years. It was a major tragedy for Michelangelo that his plan for a vast temple-mausoleum within St. Peter's had to be abandoned, and that the monument finally erected in San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, was a mere travesty of his heroic conception. Works that were to have been included in the scheme were the colossal Moses (San Pietro in Vincoli) and statues known as Slaves (Academy, Florence; Louvre). He worked (1520-34) on the sepulchral chapel of the Medici in the second sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence, and designed the elegant, mannerist Laurentian Library which forms a part of the church. In the sacristy he combined sculpture and architecture into a powerful expressive unity. A forceful contrast between contemplation and action is embodied in his statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici and the allegorical figures of Dawn, Evening, Night, and Day. Michelangelo assisted (1529) as engineer in the defense of Florence and then established himself in Rome where he became deeply attached to a young nobleman, Tommaso Cavalieri, to whom he dedicated many sonnets and several drawings of an allegorical nature.

From 1534 to 1541 he worked on the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel. From this period dates his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, to whom he dedicated many religious sonnets. After executing (1541-50) the Pauline Chapel (Vatican) frescoes of the Conversion of Paul and Martyrdom of Peter, he devoted himself principally to architecture. In 1547 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo, the younger, as chief architect of St. Peter's. Michelangelo was responsible for the dominant features of the main body of the church, its centralized Greekcross plan and the great dome which was completed, after his death, by Domenico Fontana and Giacomo della Porta, who only slightly modified Michelangelo's plan. Other architectural works included remodeling the tepidarium of the baths of Diocletian into the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and designing the facades and court of the palace group on the Capitoline Hill. Two unfinished sculptured Pietà groups testify to the tendency toward increasingly spiritualized and abstract form in Michelangelo's last years. The one now in the Cathedral o f Florence was intended by Michelangelo for his own tomb; it was smashed and survives as reassembled by another sculptor, who may have added or entirely reworked the figure of the Magdalen. The Rondanini Pietà (now Castello Sforzesco, Milan) was begun c.1555 and was left unfinished at Michelangelo's death.

Michelangelo thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, and a feeling for the expressive potentialities of sculptural form manifests itself in all phases of his work. As a 16th-century artist, he was forced to depend on the favor of great patrons who had the means and power to award commissions worthy of his genius. Throughout his career his artistic ambitions were thwarted by the caprices of these patrons, by the social instability of the times, by jealousy of other artists, and by the deep moral conflicts that arose within his own spirit. This struggle is expressed in an art whose universality transcends definition in terms of one style and which scholars have variously categorized as best associated with the High Renaissance, mannerist or baroque periods. Many of Michelangelo's designs have survived only through his drawings. Using a technique of vigorous cross-hatching, he did many anatomical studies and created numerous forceful compositions. His compositions were adapted by his followers and imitated for generations. There are great collections of his drawings in the Louvre; Uffizi and Casa Buonarroti, Florence; British Museum; Windsor Castle; and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Copyright The Columbia Encyclopedia, 1975