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Michelangelo Buonarroti: Florence
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Biography: Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 near Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy. Arezzo was an ancient city, dating back through Latin to Etruscan times. He was raised in Florence, located not far from Arezzo. Michelangelo died at the age of 88 in 1564 in Rome. Michelangelo apprenticed under the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. Between 1490 to 1494, he patronized by the Medici, attending their court, but he left Florence in 1494 after the Medici were expelled from Florence after the rise of Savonarola, going first to Venice, and then to Bologna.
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Michelangelo Buonarroti was born to a family that had for several generations belonged to minor nobility in Florence but had, by the time the artist was born, lost its patrimony and status. His father had only occasional government jobs, and at the time of Michelangelo's birth he was administrator of the small dependent town of Caprese. A few months later... the family returned to its permanent residence in Florence. It was something of a downward social step to become an artist, and Michelangelo became an apprentice relatively late, at 13, perhaps after overcoming his father's objections. He was apprenticed to the city's most prominent painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio, for a three-year term, but he left after one year, having (Condivi recounts) nothing more to learn. Several drawings, copies of figures by Ghirlandaio and older great painters of Florence, Giotto and Masaccio, survive from this stage; such copying was standard for apprentices, but few examples are known to survive.
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Michelangelo (full name: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) was born at Caprese, a village in Florentine territory, where his father, named Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni was the resident magistrate. A few weeks after Michelangelo's birth the family returned to Florence, and, in 1488, after overcoming parental opposition he was formally apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio for a term of three years. Later in life Michelangelo tried to suppress this fact, probably to make it seem that he had never had an ordinary workshop training; for it was he more than anyone else who introduced the idea of the 'Fine Arts' having no connection with the craft that painting had always previously been. His stay in the Ghirlandaio shop must ... have coincided with his beginning to work as a sculptor in the Medici Garden, where antiques from their collection were looked after by Bertoldo. Although this connection drew him into the Medici circle as a familiar, the account by Vasari of an established 'school' is now discredited. It must, however, have been Ghirlandaio who taught him the elements of fresco technique, and it was probably also in that shop that he made his drawings after the great Florentine masters of the past (copies after Giotto and Masaccio; now in the Louvre, in Munich, and in Vienna).
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Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475 in Caprese, Italy. At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, from whom he learned the technique of fresco; he would use this technique many years later in his work in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. At the age of fifteen, Michelangelo began to spend time in the home and gardens of Lorenzo de' Medici, where he studied sculpture under Bertoldo di Giovanni. Michelangelo was to be a protégé of the Medici family for the rest of his life, even when he fought against them during the famous siege of Florence in 1530.
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Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy, a village where his father, Lodovico Buonarroti, was briefly serving as a Florentine government agent. The family moved back to Florence before Michelangelo was one month old. Michelangelo's mother died when he was six. From his childhood Michelangelo was drawn to the arts, but his father considered this pursuit below the family's social status and tried to discourage him. However, Michelangelo prevailed and was apprenticed (worked to learn a trade) at the age of thirteen to Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), the most fashionable painter in Florence at the time.
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Through Michelangelo's grandmother, the Buonarroti were distantly related to the Medici, the de facto rulers of Florence and the greatest art patrons of the Renaissance. Exploiting this distant family relationship, as was common practice in the Renaissance, Ludovico Buonarroti succeeded in placing his young son in the Medici entourage. The Medici were successful bankers and the most influential family in Florence; they provided for hundreds of family members, wives, cousins, distant relatives, illegitimate children, servants, and retainers, as well as writers, musicians, and artists. In the large Medici household, Michelangelo came in contact with the most learned men of the century, and the patron of them all, Lorenzo de' Medici, known as "the Magnificent." Inspired by this circle of intellectuals, Michelangelo may have created his first independent works of art, but what he gained above all in the Medici household was a humanist education. There he learned to speak and write well, and was exposed to a world of learning and culture for which the Renaissance, and the Medici in particular, are famous.
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