Michelangelo finished David before thirty and still reshaped Rome
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 6 March 1475 to 18 February 1564, sculpted the Pietà and David before age thirty, then frescoed Genesis on the Sistine ceiling and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. Peers called him Il Divino for a terribilità that later fed Mannerism.
Born in Caprese when his father Ludovico served as local administrator, he was raised in Florence after the family bank failed. His mother Francesca died in 1481; as a child he lived with a stonecutter's household in Settignano near a family marble quarry, joking that chisel skill came with his nurse's milk. Apprenticed at thirteen to Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1488, he soon entered Lorenzo de' Medici's circle and the Platonic Academy under voices such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
After Lorenzo's death in 1492 he studied anatomy on corpses at Santo Spirito, fled Savonarola's Florence for Bologna, and reached Rome on 25 June 1496. Cardinal Riario's Bacchus was rejected; Cardinal Jean de Bilhères then ordered the Pietà. Back in Florence the Wool Guild asked him to finish a forty-year-old Carrara block begun by Agostino di Duccio; the resulting David became a republican emblem. Though he claimed not to be a painter, the Sistine Chapel commissions remain among Western art's most cited frescoes.
At seventy-one he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as architect of St. Peter's Basilica; the Laurentian Library already showed Mannerist architectural nerve. Giorgio Vasari, publishing while Michelangelo still lived, ranked him supreme across sculpture, painting, and architecture. Classical antiquity supplied his models; rivals measured themselves against Leonardo. He died in 1564 after a career spent mostly in Rome from his thirties onward, leaving an expressive physicality later artists chased into Mannerism.
Source: Michelangelo
