50 Fun Facts About Michelangelo

Michelangelo was born in 1475 in Caprese, a small town in which Italian region?

Tuscany, but only by chance: his Florentine father was serving a short term as magistrate of little Caprese, and within months the family had moved back to Florence.

As a boy in Settignano, Michelangelo lived with a nanny whose husband did what job?

Stonecutter: Michelangelo later joked that he had sucked in the hammer and chisels of his trade along with his wet nurse's milk.

At 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to which Florentine fresco master?

Domenico Ghirlandaio ran the city's leading fresco workshop. Michelangelo's father had fought the move, thinking an artist's trade beneath the family, and the boy left his three-year term early.

Ghiberti's bronze doors, which Michelangelo reportedly called 'the Gates of Paradise', hang on which Florentine building?

The Baptistery's east doors are Ghiberti's masterpiece. Vasari has Michelangelo, asked his opinion while walking past, reply that they were beautiful enough to stand at the gates of Paradise.

Which ruler of Florence took the teenage Michelangelo into his own household around 1490?

Lorenzo de' Medici, 'the Magnificent', gave the boy a room in his palace and a seat at the family table. One of the sons he grew up beside became Pope Leo X, one of his great later patrons.

Fellow student Pietro Torrigiano left the teenage Michelangelo with what lifelong mark after a quarrel?

A broken nose, flattened by one punch, shows in his later portraits. Torrigiano had to get out of Florence and ended up in England, where he made Henry VII's tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Michelangelo reportedly carved a wooden crucifix for Santo Spirito's prior in thanks for what?

Permission to dissect corpses from the convent's hospital came with rooms to work in, by Vasari's account. A wooden crucifix rediscovered in modern times is thought by some scholars, though not all, to be the one he carved.

In January 1494, Piero de' Medici commissioned Michelangelo to make a statue out of what?

Snow had fallen heavily on Florence, so Piero had him model a figure in the palace courtyard. Vasari calls it very beautiful, and it is the one Michelangelo that was certain to melt.

Michelangelo's marble Sleeping Cupid was sold to a cardinal in Rome passed off as what?

An ancient work is what Cardinal Riario believed he had bought, because the marble had been artificially aged. He demanded his money back, yet was impressed enough to invite the young sculptor to Rome.

Michelangelo's first large statue in Rome, carved in his early twenties, shows which Roman god?

Bacchus, god of wine, sways as if drunk, an unsteadiness Michelangelo carved on purpose. The statue stood for years among genuine antiques in the Roman garden of the banker Jacopo Galli.

A French cardinal commissioned Michelangelo's St Peter's Pietà to stand where?

His own funeral chapel, in the old St Peter's, was the statue's first home. Mary holding the dead Christ on her lap was then a subject far more common in northern Europe than in Italy.

Where is Michelangelo's only known signature on any of his works?

On Mary's sash on the Pietà he cut his name in Latin, adding 'the Florentine, made this'. Vasari's story is that he had overheard visitors credit the statue to a sculptor from Milan.

Michelangelo's David was originally commissioned to stand high on the roofline of which Florentine building?

The Cathedral wanted the statue for one of its buttresses, and the block had lain half-worked and abandoned for some 40 years. The finished David was judged too big to hoist that high.

A 1504 committee that included Leonardo and Botticelli chose which Florence square for Michelangelo's David?

Piazza della Signoria put the giant-killer at the door of the city's government, as a symbol of Florentine strength and independence. A replica stands on the spot today, with the original kept safe indoors.

Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina showed soldiers surprised by a call to arms while doing what?

Bathing in the river let him show off what he did best, a wall of twisting male nudes scrambling for their clothes and armour. It was planned to face a Leonardo battle scene in the same hall, and neither was completed.

The Doni Tondo, Michelangelo's painting of the Holy Family, hangs in which gallery?

The Uffizi in Florence holds it in its original frame. By Vasari's account the merchant Agnolo Doni tried to pay 40 ducats instead of 70, so Michelangelo doubled his price to 140 and got it.

Which pope ordered a 40-statue tomb from Michelangelo that dragged on for four decades?

Julius II died in 1513 with little of it built, and each new contract with his heirs shrank the plan. What was finally finished four decades on was a far smaller wall tomb.

Michelangelo's horned marble statue in Rome's church of San Pietro in Vincoli shows which biblical figure?

Moses has horns because the Latin Bible of the day called his face 'horned' as he came down from Sinai, where the Hebrew is now usually read as shining with rays of light.

According to Michelangelo's early biographers, which rival pushed the pope to give him the Sistine ceiling, hoping he would fail?

Bramante, the pope's architect, is said to have counted on a sculptor with almost no fresco experience making a fool of himself. Michelangelo did try to refuse the job, protesting that painting was not his trade.

Despite the myth, Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling in what position?

Standing, head tilted back, on a high scaffold is how writers who knew him describe it. They add that for some time afterwards he could read a letter only by holding it above his head.

On the Sistine ceiling, God's outstretched finger reaches towards the hand of which reclining figure?

Adam lies back on bare earth, barely able to lift his hand, as God sweeps in with a cloak full of angels. Michelangelo froze the scene an instant before the fingers meet, and it became one of the most copied images in art.

The Sistine ceiling's central Genesis scenes run from the Creation to the story of which figure?

Noah closes the cycle, with the Flood and his drunkenness. Michelangelo painted the Noah end first and worked backwards towards the Creation, and his figures grew larger and bolder as he went.

What happened to San Lorenzo's front after Michelangelo's façade project was cancelled?

It still has no façade today, only the rough masonry his white marble front was meant to cover. Michelangelo lost years to the project, much of it opening quarries in the mountains near Pietrasanta.

The Medici Chapel tombs carry allegorical figures of Night and Day and which other pair?

Dusk and Dawn recline on the tomb of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, with Night and Day on the tomb opposite. Michelangelo said the four stood for time's endless round, which carries everyone to death.

What dominates Michelangelo's entrance hall to the Laurentian Library in Florence?

A huge staircase spills down from the reading-room door like a flow of stone. The library had to be built on top of older convent buildings, and its hall is often cited as the start of Mannerist architecture.

When Florence threw out the Medici and came under siege, Michelangelo served the republic by taking charge of what?

The city's fortifications were his to design, and he drew angular defences meant to blunt cannon fire. After Florence fell in 1530, the Medici pope first condemned him, then pardoned him to get him back to work.

Where is Michelangelo thought to have hidden for two months in 1530?

A tiny chamber beneath the Medici chapels still bears charcoal and chalk sketches thought to be his, made while the Medici pope wanted him dead. Found under a trapdoor in the 1970s, it opened to visitors in 2023.

Vittoria Colonna, the noble widow who became Michelangelo's close friend in his sixties, was known in her own right as what?

A poet: by Vasari's account the two exchanged verses, and he made drawings as gifts for her. Michelangelo stayed devoted to the pious marchioness until her death in 1547.

Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment on which part of the Sistine Chapel?

The altar wall took him from 1536 to 1541. Clement VII commissioned it shortly before he died and Paul III saw it through, and its beardless Christ was among the breaks with tradition that critics attacked.

In The Last Judgment, whose flayed skin bears Michelangelo's own likeness?

Saint Bartholomew's skin hangs from his own hand because he was martyred by being flayed alive. The sagging face on it is usually read as Michelangelo's own, a bleak self-portrait tucked in among the saints.

What did the Church later have done to Michelangelo's Last Judgment?

Draperies painted over its nudes were the work of the painter Daniele da Volterra, known ever after as 'the breeches-maker'. His cover-ups were only the first, and more were added in later centuries.

Michelangelo's design for the Capitoline Hill piazza displays the ancient bronze statue of which emperor?

Marcus Aurelius escaped the medieval melting pot because he was mistaken for Constantine, the first Christian emperor. The rider in the square today is a copy, with the ancient original kept indoors next door.

Michelangelo's Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome was created inside what ancient structure?

A Roman bathhouse, the vast Baths of Diocletian, already had the soaring vaults a church needed, so he fitted one inside and left the ancient hall largely as it stood. He was in his late eighties, and others finished it after his death.

The two frescoes Michelangelo painted for the Cappella Paolina depict the conversion of St Paul and what?

The crucifixion of St Peter and its partner wore him out: by Vasari's account he finished them at 75 and said fresco was no work for old men. They were his last paintings, in a papal chapel that is not open to tourists.

Which part of today's St Peter's did Michelangelo design?

The dome was completed by others after he died at 88. He had become the basilica's architect in his seventies and refused any pay, saying he served for the love of God.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist to have what published during his lifetime?

His biography came first from Vasari, whose glowing life of 1550 did not entirely please him. Three years later his assistant Condivi published a rival version that told the story the way Michelangelo wanted it told.

By what nickname was Michelangelo often known in his lifetime?

Il Divino, 'the divine one', was how admirers spoke of him while he was still alive, and the speaker at his funeral praised 'the divine Michelangelo'. Vasari went further, presenting him as sent by God to perfect all three arts.

Michelangelo grew rich, yet his own assistant recorded that he often went to bed still wearing what?

His boots stayed on so long, Condivi says, that skin sometimes came away with them. Vasari has him sleeping in his clothes too, too weary to undress, and adds that although he was rich he lived like a poor man.

Since a man attacked it with a hammer in 1972, Michelangelo's Pietà in St Peter's has been displayed how?

Behind bulletproof glass, after a man struck the statue repeatedly with a hammer, chipping Mary's eyelid among other damage. Restorers pieced her back together from the fragments before she went back on show.

The world knows him by his first name alone, but what was Michelangelo's family name?

Buonarroti: in full he was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. His family claimed descent from the noble counts of Canossa, a pedigree he believed but which has never been proved.

How did Michelangelo's grandnephew alter the poems he published in 1623?

He changed the gender of the pronouns so that love poems written to a young Roman nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, read as if addressed to a woman. His doctored text stood for more than two centuries.

Michelangelo said of which rival, 'all he had in art, he got from me'?

Raphael had been dead for over twenty years when Michelangelo wrote this in a bitter letter of 1542. He still blamed the younger painter's envy for his failure to finish a pope's tomb.

Stolen by German troops in 1944, Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges turned up a year later among Nazi loot hidden where?

In a salt mine at Altaussee in Austria, stacked with treasures that included the Ghent Altarpiece. Flemish cloth merchants had bought the statue while Michelangelo was alive, and its rescue features in the film The Monuments Men.

In the Pietà Michelangelo carved for his tomb, the hooded old man holding up Christ is thought to portray whom?

The sculptor himself looks down from under the hood, on a figure read as Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea. He later turned on the unfinished group and broke parts of it, and a friend pieced it back together.

In what state did Michelangelo leave the Rondanini Pietà, the last statue he ever worked on?

Rough and unfinished: he revised it again and again on the same block. He cut the first version back so far that one of its arms hangs, detached, beside the two thin, leaning figures.

Michelangelo died in February 1564, two months before which English writer's birth?

William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford that April. By Vasari's account the dying Michelangelo made his will in three sentences: his soul to God, his body to the earth, his goods to his nearest kin.

In which Florentine basilica is Michelangelo buried?

Santa Croce brought him home to Florence, as he had asked. His nephew got the body out of Rome quietly, sending it north packed in a bale as if it were a piece of merchandise.

Michelangelo's David was carved from marble quarried where?

Carrara's quarries drew him back for a later project: he spent eight months in those mountains choosing stone, and dreamed of carving giant figures out of the mountains themselves.

Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel look down on which event, still held there today?

A pope's election takes place beneath his ceiling, with the cardinals shut away until they agree. A stove and chimney are fitted for the ballots, and white smoke tells the crowd outside that a new pope has been chosen.

The story goes that a papal official who called the Last Judgment fit for a tavern was painted into it where?

In hell, as the judge Minos with a serpent coiled round him: that was Michelangelo's revenge on Biagio da Cesena, the pope's master of ceremonies. By Vasari's account Biagio begged the pope to have it removed, and got nowhere.