Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born at Caprese, a village in Florentine territory on March 6, 1475. When he returned to Florence with his father and his brothers, he lived and grew like normal boys near there. He was a stone cutter he cut marble for sculptors. But he decided he didn’t like his job and he loved art so he started sculpting and painted frescoes. When he made his first sculpture of a fawn at the age of 14 and that’s when he met the Medici family. They took him in and treated him as an adopted son. Michelangelo was living in the Medici house when he created many sculptures and frescoes while with them.
Michelangelo always said he could see the figure in the statue before he carved it and he explained himself as freeing the sculpture from its marble prison. In his mid years made the statue of David (a 13 foot statue) and the pieta sculpted in 1508 at the time were possibly the greatest works at this time in his life, until the pope made him paint the Sistine Chapel. At first Michelangelo said no but the pope kept pushing him to the point where he left for Rome. But the pope’s men tracked him down and he came back and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He got his assistants together and they started. But after a couple paintings were made and everyone left he destroyed the paintings because he didn’t like them. The pope was furious, but Michelangelo came back and painted the ceiling but half way through Michelangelo got sick and could have died. But Catherine de’ Medici revived him. He went back and finished the fresco that took him 4 years to finish. After that he went and carved the pope’s tomb that had Moses sitting on top of it.
Michelangelo in his late years was still painting and sculpting. The new pope brought him back to paint a fresco on the wall behind the alter; Michelangelo called it The Last Judgment painted in 1534. It was all about death and the battle between heaven and hell.
