LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Michelangelo Buonarroti: Artists
built 659 days ago
Michelangelo disliked his school work, especially Latin. He wanted to be a great artist. His father disapproved and told him that becoming an artist was not something gentlemen should do. But his father could not stop Michelangelo from drawing and in 1488, when Michelangelo was 13 years old, he was sent to begin his apprenticeship in the studio of a well-known artist named Ghirlanaio.
Source:
From this time onwards Michelangelo was supporting his father and brothers and was swamped with commissions. This meant that for practical reasons he was forced more and more to delegate artistic duties and to invest more and more time in his work. He could not refuse opportunities to create and amaze. Many potential apprentices left Michelangelo’s guiding side because they could not tolerate the high expectations he enforced, nor the little time he offered to himself or others outside of artistic pursuits. Michelangelo often lived in squalor and rarely socialized with others. Due to his abrupt temperament contemporaries labeled him a curmudgeon.
Source:
In 1501, again through the agency of Jacopo Galli, Michelangelo was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini to carve fifteen statuettes for the Piccolomini altar in Siena (left incomplete by the sculptor Andrea Bregno). Even though the commission was from an extremely important patron (a cardinal and the future Pope Pius III), it proved to be singularly unsuited to the artist's temperament. Reluctant--to complete, like some journeyman, another artist's unfinished work, Michelangelo carved only four of the statuettes and then avoided fulfilling the remainder of his obligation, even to the point of legal difficulties. Michelangelo readily set the Piccolomini carvings aside when he received the unusual opportunity to carve a David.
Source:
The artistic genius of Michelangelo (1475-1564) is beyond question. One the most important figures in the history of art, his monumental paintings in the Sistine Chapel, his sculpture David in Florence, and his Pietà at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome are among the greatest human achievements of all time and remain the most visited and admired works of art in the world. Michelangelo's life has been the subject of many biographies over the centuries, but it was not until the appearance of John Addington Symonds's The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, in 1893, that a biographer had complete access to the artist's family archives.
Source:
"Michelangelo drew extensively as a child, and his father placed him under the tutelage of Ghirlandaio, a respected artist of the day." This six-part biography from the Infoplease Encyclopedia is an excellent resource for school reports. Best clicks are the hyperlinked keywords that whisk you away to related articles, and the Cite function (small link in the middle of the page) that creates bibliographic citations. If you get lost in the maze of linked pages, you can always find your way back by using the Search Biographies function in the lower left-hand corner of any page.
Source:
In contrast to the romantic conception of the artist as lone genius, contemporary scholars tend to view Michelangelo in a broad historical and social context. In Italy and throughout European civilization, the family was fundamental to self-definition; a family's status established an individual's status. Michelangelo was one of just a handful of Renaissance artists, including Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Leon Battista Alberti, who were born into patrician families. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that Michelangelo's father resisted his son's artistic inclinations; the boy should have aspired to a more elevated profession, to political office, and to a socially advantageous marriage. The tension between his patrician birth and his fundamentally manual profession occasionally caused Michelangelo to experience doubt about his art (best expressed in his poetry), and to encounter conflict with his patrons.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Artists