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Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 - 1564) was a Renaissance painter, sculptor, poet and architect. He is famous for creating the frescoes "The Martyrdom of St. Peter" and "The Conversion of St. Paul" in the Vatican's Capella Paolina, the ceiling and the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, as well as countless sculptures including those of the Virgin, Bacchus, Pieta, David, Moses, Rachel, Leah, and members of the Medici family.

Life History

Michelagnolo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6th, 1475, in Caprese, Tuscany, Italy. Michelangelo's father, Lodovico, was the resident magistrate in Caprese. However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence and later lived with a sculptor and his wife in the town of Settignano where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm.

Against his father's wishes, Michelangelo chose to be the apprentice of Domenico Ghirlandaio for three years starting in 1488. Impressed, Domenico recommended him to the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended Lorenzo's school and during his stay, Michelangelo would be influenced by many prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art and even his feelings about sexuality. It was during this period that Michelangelo created two reliefs: Battle of the Centaurs and Madonna of the Steps.

After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, Piero de' Medici (Lorenzo's oldest son and new head of the Medici family), refused to support Michelangelo' artwork. Also at this time, the ideas of Savonarola became popular in Florence. Under these two pressures, Michelangelo decided to leave Florence and stay in Bologna for three years. Soon afterwards, Cardinal San Giorgio purchased Michelangelo's marble Cupid and decided to summon him to Rome in 1496. Influenced by Roman antiquity, he produced the Bacchus and the Pietà.

Four years later, Michelangelo returned to Florence where he produced arguably his most famous work, the marble David. He also painted the Holy Family of the Tribune.

Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome in 1503 by the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However, under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. The most famous of which was the monumental paintings on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel which took four years (1508 - 1512). Due to these and later interruptions, Michelangelo would work on the tomb for 40 years without ever finishing it.

In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the exterior of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo agreed reluctantly, but was unable to accomplish this feat (the church's exterior is unadorned to this day).

Michelangelo came to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529 while the city was under siege. His fresco of the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Paul III almost 20 years later (1534-1541). Then in 1547, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

Seven years later, on February 18th, 1564, Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 89. His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's "Vite".

Controversy, Censorship and the 'Fig-Leaf Campaign'

When the work was finished on the Last Judgment in (October 1541), Michelangelo was accused of intolerable obscenity for his depictions of naked figures showing genitals (and inside a church, and in St.Peter's, the most important one). A violent censorship campaign was organized by Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) to remove the frescoes, but the Pope resisted.

In coincidence with Michelangelo's death, a law was issued to cover genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, covered with sort of perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered the complex of bodies (see details , , ). When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers chose not to remove the perizomas of Daniele; however, a faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is now in Naples, at the Capodimonte Museum.

Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" (inventor of obscenities, in a sense that in Italian sounds like as if he had also created the form of... indecent organs).

The "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter Reformation to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the bronze statue of "Cristo della Minerva" was covered, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in "Madonna of Bruges" (Belgium) remained covered for several decades.

In the 1970s, the Pietà, in St. Peter's first chapel at right, was assaulted by a mentally ill man, who seriously damaged it with a hammer.

Michelangelo the Man

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought that art originated from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are therefore in forceful movement; each is in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor is too free the forms that, he believed, were already inside the stone. This can most vividly be seen in his unfinished statuary figures, which to many appear to be struggling to free themselves from the stone.

He also instilled into his figures a sense of moral cause for action. A good example of this can be seen in the facial expression of his marble statue David. Arguably his second most famous work (after David) is the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which is a synthesis of architecture, sculpture & painting. His Last Judgement, also in the Sistine Chapel, is a depiction of extreme crisis.

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was deeply appreciated in his own time. It is said that when still a young apprentice, he had made a neoclassical statue (Il Putto Dormiente, the sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection, that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman original. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the Moses (Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli), Michelangelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting: "why don't you speak to me?".

It has been claimed that Michelangelo was an abstinent bisexual that had very intense attraction for male beauty. In fact, Michelangelo developed romantic but apparently non-sexual relationships with at least one man, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who was 23 years old when he met Michelangelo in 1532. Michelangelo wrote a series of romantic sonnets as a result of this apparent infatuation.

The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.