Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet whose working life spanned more than seventy years of the Renaissance. He carved the Pietà in St Peter's and the David in Florence, painted the ceiling and the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, and designed the dome of St Peter's Basilica. In his own lifetime he was already called "divine", and no artist has done more to shape the European idea of the solitary creative genius.

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 at Caprese, a small town in the hills east of Florence, where his father, Lodovico di Leonardo Buonarroti, was serving a short term as the local magistrate. The family, of minor gentry stock, soon returned to Florence. His mother died when he was six, and he was put out to a wet nurse in Settignano, a village of stonecutters, a fact he later joked had given him his love of the chisel.

His father wanted a respectable career for him, but in 1488, aged thirteen, he was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, from whom he learned the technique of fresco. Within a year he had moved to the sculpture garden kept by Lorenzo de' Medici, the city's effective ruler, and was taken into the Medici household. There he studied ancient statues and met the scholars of Lorenzo's circle, whose Neoplatonic ideas about beauty as a reflection of the divine, part of wider Renaissance philosophy, coloured his later art and poetry. Two marble reliefs survive from these years, the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs.

After Lorenzo died in 1492 and the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, Michelangelo spent time in Bologna and then went to Rome in 1496. There he carved a drunken Bacchus and, in 1498 to 1499, the Pietà for a French cardinal, showing the Virgin holding the dead Christ across her lap. It made his name, and it is the only work he ever signed, with his name cut across the strap on Mary's chest.

Back in Florence in 1501, he took over a tall block of marble that had been abandoned decades earlier and turned it into the David, finished in 1504. The giant nude, shown tense before the fight with Goliath rather than after victory, was set up outside the Palazzo della Signoria as a symbol of the Florentine republic. The city also commissioned him to paint a battle scene in its council hall, opposite one by Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he had a famously cool relationship. Neither mural was finished, though his full-size drawing for the Battle of Cascina was copied and studied by a generation of young artists.

In 1505 Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome to design a vast tomb with some forty statues. The project was soon put aside, and it haunted Michelangelo for forty years through repeated contracts with Julius's heirs. It was finally completed on a much smaller scale in 1545 in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, with the seated Moses at its centre.

Instead, Julius set him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the pope's private chapel in the Vatican. Michelangelo protested that he was a sculptor, but between 1508 and 1512 he covered the vault with more than three hundred figures. Nine central panels tell the story of Genesis, from the separation of light and darkness to the drunkenness of Noah, with the Creation of Adam among them. Around them sit Hebrew prophets and pagan sibyls and the twenty nude youths known as the ignudi. The ceiling's muscular, twisting bodies and bold colour changed painting in Rome, including the work of his younger rival Raphael, who was decorating rooms in the same palace.

When two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, came to power, Michelangelo worked mainly in Florence for the family at their church of San Lorenzo. He designed the New Sacristy, a funerary chapel with tombs for Medici dukes and the reclining figures of Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk, and the Laurentian Library, whose staircase and vestibule broke the classical rules of architecture in a deliberately unsettling way.

Politics intervened. In 1527 the troops of Charles V sacked Rome, and Florence threw out the Medici again. Michelangelo, a republican at heart, supervised the city's fortifications during the siege of 1529 to 1530. When the Medici returned he was pardoned, but he left Florence for good in 1534 and spent the last thirty years of his life in Rome.

Clement VII, and then Paul III, commissioned the Last Judgement for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1536 and 1541. It shows a beardless, powerful Christ amid a swirl of the saved rising and the damned falling, and it has none of the calm of the ceiling. Its many nudes drew criticism in the tense religious climate after the Protestant Reformation, and after the Council of Trent another painter was hired to add draperies. In Rome Michelangelo formed deep friendships with the young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri and the poet Vittoria Colonna, who drew him into circles seeking reform within the Catholic Church. He wrote some three hundred poems, sonnets and madrigals on love, art and salvation, which were published by a great-nephew in 1623.

In old age he became chiefly an architect. He redesigned the Capitoline Hill as a civic square, and from 1546 he was chief architect of the new St Peter's Basilica, a post he held unpaid until his death. He returned to Bramante's centralised plan and designed the great double-shelled dome, which was completed after his death by Giacomo della Porta. His last sculptures, unfinished Pietàs he hacked at and reworked, are rough and intensely personal. He died in Rome on 18 February 1564, aged 88, and his body was carried secretly to Florence and buried in the church of Santa Croce.

Michelangelo was the first artist to be the subject of biographies in his lifetime: Giorgio Vasari's Lives of 1550 ended with him as the summit of art, and his pupil Ascanio Condivi published another in 1553. His treatment of the human body, especially the male nude in motion, became the basis of the style later called Mannerism and of academic training for centuries. His reputation for intense work, isolation and quarrels with patrons helped create the modern image of the artist as an inspired individual rather than a craftsman. The Sistine Chapel, cleaned between 1980 and 1994 to reveal its bright colours, remains one of the most visited rooms on earth, and his works are central to the story of the Renaissance and of Italy.