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Michelangelo Buonarroti: Artists
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One of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese, Italy in 1475. His father was governor of the village where he was born. Michelangelo's mother died when he was very little, so his father sent him to live in the home of a stonecutter. Michelangelo lived with the stonecutters until he was ten years old. Then his father sent for him so he could live at home with his four brothers and study the academic subjects which gentlemen were expected to know.
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It is evident that after the extended interlude of the Republic and the dangerous period following its collapse, Michelangelo no longer felt the same commitment to the Medici projects. Increasingly disaffected with Florence, where the last vestige of republican liberty was erased when the tyrant Alessandro de' Medici was prodaimed duke in 1532, Michelangelo spent more and more time in Rome. There he found a large community of Florentine expatriates and a new friend, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who renewed his artistic and poetic inspiration. In 1534, Michelangelo left Florence and never returned. He spent the remaining thirty years of his life in Rome, and, like his beloved Dante, in exile.
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Unlike any previous artist, Michelangelo was the subject of two biographies in his own lifetime. The first of these was by Vasari, who concluded the first (1550) edition of his 'Vite' with the Life of one living artist, Michelangelo. In 1553 there appeared a 'Life of Michelangelo' by his pupil Ascanio Condivi (English translations 1903, 1976 and 1987); this is really almost an autobiography, promoted by Michelangelo to correct some errors of Vasari and to shift the emphasis in what Michelangelo regarded as a more desirable direction. Vasari... became more and more friendly with Michelangelo and was also his most devoted and articulate admirer, so that the very long Life which appears in Vasari's second edition (1568), after Michelangelo's death, gives us the most complete biography of any artist up to that time and is a trustworthy guide to the feelings of contemporaries about the man who can lay claim to be the greatest sculptor, painter and draughtsman that has ever lived, as well as one of the greatest architects and poets. He is the archetype of genius.
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Unlike Leonardo, Michelangelo was of noble birth. His father, Ludovico di Buonarotti, sent his son to be raised by a stone carver and his wife, since his mother was too ill to nurse him. It was because of this arrangement that the young boy learned to carve. Michelangelo later wrote, "When I told my father that I wished to be an artist, he flew into a rage, saying that 'artists are laborers, no better than shoemakers.' " His father wanted him to be a man of letters, a scholar of higher learning. When Michelangelo finally convinced him to allow him to apprentice to be an artist, his talent emerged in very little time. He went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens, and when Lorenzo de Medici recognized his talent, was invited live in the Medici household.
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Michelangelo was born near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany, Italy in 1475. His 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. Michelangelo once said to the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, "What good I have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and ... because I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse's milk."
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Michelangelo spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici household, surrounded by members of Lorenzo's humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de' Medici (subsequently Popes Leo X and Clement VII). The death of Lorenzo in 1492 left Michelangelo without a patron or a regular income. Rather than try to make a living in the traditional manner of artists, by joining or opening a workshop, he bided his time and hoped for a new patron.
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