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Michelangelo

This paper will discuss the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), who is "the most famous artist who ever lived and many would say the greatest" (Hibbard 10). Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance artist who is most widely known for his sculptures David and the Pieta, as well as the frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475 in the village of Caprese, where his father Lodovico Buonarroti, "was serving a short term as mayor (podesta) - almost his first job" (15). The family had once been wealthy, but by the time Michelangelo was born they had lost most of their fortune. Even so, they were proud people who continued to live as though they were still rich. For example, Michelangelo's father "took on the grand manner of a decadent nobleman and would not work" (Besdine 15). Michelangelo was the second of five sons, and when he was only one month old, his parents sent him to live with a wet-nurse on a farm in Settignano, near Florence. Little is known about this woman who raised Michelangelo until he was ten years old, other than that she was the daughter and wife of stone masons. In his later years, the artist used to joke that "he had taken in the hammer and chisel along with her milk" (Hibbard 15). When Michelangelo was six years old, his mother died, and four years later, when his father remarried, he went to live with his own family at Florence for the first time. Upon joining his father's household, he was sent to school, which he greatly disliked. His father had hoped that he would become a man of letters, but the young Michelangelo "constantly ran off to draw and to watch artists at work" (16). Around this time, he became friends with an older boy named Francesco Granacci, who was then a student of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). Granacci encouraged Michelangelo, and helped him to convince his father to let him study art. He also helped him to get a posi...

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Michelangelo. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:07, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693296.html