Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

(March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), commonly known as

Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor,
architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond
the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was 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. Indeed it was said that a true
Renaissance man needed to have all these talents and also to have
been a diplomat and that Michelangelo was the only person to have
ever embodied these criteria.

Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was

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 the David, were sculpted before he turned
thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also
created two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of
Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last
Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in
life he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in the same city
and revolutionised classical architecture with his invention of the
giant order of pilasters.

In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, two

biographies were published of Michelangelo during his own
lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the
pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the
Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art
history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il
Divino ("the divine one"), an appropriate sobriquet given his
intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by his
contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring
grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate
Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted
in the next major movement in Western art after the High
Renaissance, Mannerism

Michelangelo's David

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499–1501. Things were

changing in the city after the fall of Savonarola and the rise of the
gonfaloniere Pier Soderini. He was asked by the consuls of the
Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years
earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue portraying David
as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della
Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded
by completing his most famous work, David in 1504. This
masterwork, created out of marble from the quarries at Carrara,
definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of
extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination.

Also during this period, Michelangelo painted the Holy Family

and St John, also known as the Doni Tondo or the Holy Family of
the Tribune: it was commissioned for the marriage of Angelo Doni
and Maddalena Strozzi and in the 17th Century hung in the room
known as the Tribune in the Uffizi. He also may have painted the
Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the
Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London.