Italian painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer
1475 CE
to 1564 CE
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, is an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer.
Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he takes up is of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian, Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life is prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.
Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, are sculpted before he turns thirty.
Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also creates two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
As an architect, Michelangelo pioneerz the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library.
At 74, he succeeds Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of Saint Peter's Basilica.
Michelangelo transforms the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.
In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he is the first Western artist whose biography is published while he was alive.
Two biographies are published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposes that he is the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that is to continue to have currency in art history for centuries.
In his lifetime he is also often called Il Divino ("the divine one").
One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries is his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it is the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that results in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.
