Michelangelo, a painter, sculptor, and architect, was born on March 6, 1475 in a village called Caprese. His father briefly served as a Florentine government agent. Unlike most artists families in Florence, Michelangelo’s’ was not successful, they earned their income from his fathers land and his mother died when he was six years old. When he was thirteen, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, the trendiest painter in Florence. A year after his apprenticeship Michelangelo gained access to the collections of ancient Roman sculptures of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. He was looked after by the retired sculptor and started his own sculptures at the young age of seventeen (Biography). He had deep religious beliefs and used to dissect cadavers so that he could study the human form for is artistic inspiration (The Brain). Then, in 1492, Lorenzo died and Michelangelo left the city and moved to Bologna and soon started his first small but eminent commission for the tomb of St. Dominic in the church of S. Domenico. Although sculpting is how Michelangelo started out, he soon was commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Biography).

In 1508, 33 year old Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II to repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Pope wanted him to stop his work on a tomb project that he was already doing for him. Because of this, Michelangelo thought that he “was being pushed aside by rival claimants on funds”. He was modest about doing the painting and protested he was a sculptor and not a painter but soon he realized that instead of just representing single figures in the painting he could introduce dramatic scenes which were so successful that it set a standard for the future (Biography).

n, O lady mine! /With chiselled touch /The stone unhewn and cold /Becomes a living mould. /the more the marble wastes, /the more the statue grows” (Bartlett). By looking at this quote pulled from a sonnet written by Michelangelo Buonarroti, it is plain to see that he was a sculptor, but only a sculptor he was not. The pictures in his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling say a million more words than a sonnet.

According to the article, “Painting by Numbers” by Ross King, as many as a dozen men took part in the Sistine chapel ceiling painting, but the contributions to the enormous fresco, an intimidating difficult and laborious technique, were eclipsed by the towering reputation of Michelangelo. Fresco-painting was a technique that called for man hours of preparations in the studio and on the scaffold before the paintbrush even touched the ceiling. It required Michelangelo to look at his work as a whole, but actually paint in patchwork fashion. Because he Michelangelo

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