A Brief Artistic Biography of Michelangelo

Michelangelo was an Italian-born artist in 1488. Not too long after his birth, he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio for three years, where Michelangelo learned elements of fresco technique and produced replicas of past Florentine masters. By the age of 16, Michelangelo was already producing his own style of art that were shown in his two relief sculptures. The following years after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, Michelangelo traveled and created more artwork. Some of the artworks produced were a wooden crucifix for the high altar for the Hospital of Sto Spirito, and marble statuettes for the Arca di San Domenico.

He eventually ended up in Rome in 1499, where he created the St. Peter’s Pieta. The Pieta was a sculpture of the seated Madonna holding Christ’s dead body in her arms. He did not depict it as how other artists thought it to be a sculpture of pain and redemption. Instead, he created the sculpture to resemble the earthly beauty of humans and the dead to an anatomical and an equilibrium scale. Therefore, he gave this particular scene a “touchup” by adding his own creati...