50 Fun Facts About Michelangelo

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

His father was the town's judicial administrator; the family returned to Florence months later.

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

His father owned a marble quarry there; he later said he took in the knack of chisel and hammer 'along with the milk of my nurse'.

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

A year later his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay him as an artist, rare for someone so young.

Michelangelo gave the nickname 'The Gates of Paradise' to bronze doors on which Florentine building?

Lorenzo Ghiberti laboured 50 years over the north and east doors.

Which ruler asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils in 1489 and received Michelangelo?

Francesco Granacci was the other; Michelangelo then attended the Medici's Platonic Academy alongside Ficino and Poliziano.

Who broke Michelangelo's nose when he was 17, leaving the disfigurement seen in his portraits?

Torrigiano was a fellow pupil at the Medici sculpture garden.

Michelangelo carved a wooden Crucifix in 1493 for Santo Spirito's prior in thanks for what?

It was the first of several times he studied anatomy by dissection.

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

It followed heavy snowfalls; later that year the Medici were expelled and Michelangelo left for Venice and Bologna.

Michelangelo's sleeping Cupid was treated to look buried and sold in Rome as what?

Cardinal Riario spotted the fraud but was so impressed he invited the sculptor to Rome.

Michelangelo's first Roman commission, for Cardinal Riario, was a statue of which Roman god?

The cardinal rejected it; banker Jacopo Galli put it in his garden.

Who commissioned the Pietà now in St Peter's Basilica?

Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas ordered it in 1497; Michelangelo was 24 when it was finished.

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

Vasari called the Pietà a miracle that a formless block could reach a perfection nature scarcely achieves in flesh.

The colossal marble block that became David had been started 40 years earlier by whom?

The Guild of Wool asked Michelangelo to finish the project, intended for the gable of Florence Cathedral.

Where did the 1504 committee including Botticelli and Leonardo decide to place David?

The original now stands in the Accademia; a marble replica took its place in the square in 1910.

Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina showed soldiers being ambushed while doing what?

It was painted for the same council chamber as Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari; both were lost, and Cascina survives only in copies.

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

Angelo Doni commissioned it as a gift for his wife; it keeps its original frame, which Michelangelo may have designed.

Pope Julius II's tomb was originally to include how many statues, finished in five years?

Michelangelo worked on it for 40 years and it was never finished to his satisfaction.

The tomb of Julius II, with its famous Moses, stands in which Roman church?

Two other figures meant for it, the Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave, are in the Louvre, where Rodin studied them.

Per Condivi, who talked the pope into giving Michelangelo the Sistine ceiling, hoping he would fail?

Bramante, busy on St Peter's, resented the tomb commission; Michelangelo had little fresco experience.

How long did the Sistine Chapel ceiling take Michelangelo to paint?

1508 to 1512; the original plan was merely the Twelve Apostles on the pendentives and ornament in the middle.

The Sistine ceiling covers some 500 square metres and contains roughly how many figures?

Nine central Genesis episodes are flanked by seven prophets and five Sibyls.

How many episodes from Genesis form the centre of the Sistine ceiling?

They fall into three groups: creation of the earth, creation and fall of humanity, and Noah's family.

After Michelangelo's San Lorenzo façade project was cancelled in 1520, what became of the front?

He had spent three years on drawings and models and even tried to open a marble quarry at Pietrasanta for it.

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

The chapel houses tombs of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and his nephew Lorenzo, plus the Medici Madonna.

Michelangelo's vestibule for which Florentine building is seen as a forerunner of Baroque architecture?

Commissioned by Clement VII in 1524, it opened in 1571 and the vestibule was not finished until 1904.

During the 1528-29 siege of Florence, Michelangelo served the republic by working on what?

When the Medici returned in 1530, Pope Clement VII sentenced him to death.

Where is Michelangelo thought to have hidden for two months in 1530 while facing a papal death sentence?

He covered its walls with charcoal and chalk drawings; the room was rediscovered in 1975 and opened to visitors in 2023.

Which poet and noble widow became one of Michelangelo's closest friends in Rome until her death in 1547?

They exchanged sonnets on spiritual matters; Condivi claimed his one regret was not kissing her face as he had her hand.

Which pope saw The Last Judgment through to completion after Clement VII commissioned it?

Michelangelo worked on the altar-wall fresco from 1534 to October 1541.

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

He also broke convention by showing Christ as a massive, muscular, beardless and naked youth.

Who was commissioned to paint over the genitals in The Last Judgment after the Council of Trent?

He was Michelangelo's apprentice; an uncensored copy by Marcello Venusti survives in Naples.

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

The trapezoid piazza was one of several late Roman architectural projects, with the Palazzo Farnese and Porta Pia.

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

He transformed the vaulted interior of the Baths of Diocletian into a church.

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

They were completed in 1550, the year Vasari published his Lives.

In what year was Michelangelo appointed architect of St Peter's Basilica?

He returned to the original centrally planned concept; the dome, finished after his death, has been called the greatest creation of the Renaissance.

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

Two were written while he lived, including Vasari's Vita in 1550.

By what nickname was Michelangelo often known in his lifetime?

Vasari proposed that he was supreme 'not in one art alone but in all three'.

Roughly what was Michelangelo's net worth in gold ducats, according to his bank accounts and deeds?

More than many princes, yet he told Condivi 'I have always lived like a poor man' and often slept in his clothes and boots.

Michelangelo wrote more than 300 sonnets and madrigals. How many are addressed to men?

They form 'the first significant modern corpus of love poetry from one man to another'.

To which young Roman nobleman did Michelangelo address his longest sequence of love poems, from 1532?

Cavalieri was 23 and Michelangelo 57; the poems predate Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth by 50 years.

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

John Addington Symonds restored the original genders in his 1893 English translation.

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

On their one recorded meeting, Michelangelo compared Raphael's entourage to a police chief's, and Raphael said Michelangelo walked alone like an executioner.

Michelangelo's earliest known marble work, carved in shallow relief, is called what?

The Battle of the Centaurs, on a theme suggested by Poliziano, dates from the same Medici years.

In the Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo portrayed himself as which figure?

He later took a hammer to it, smashing the left arm and leg of the figure of Jesus.

Why could the Rondanini Pietà, worked on six days before his death, never be finished?

It was the last sculpture he touched.

How old was Michelangelo when he died in Rome in February 1564?

His body was taken to Florence for burial, as he had wished.

In which Florentine basilica is Michelangelo buried?

His heir Lionardo commissioned Vasari to build the tomb, which cost 770 scudi and took over 14 years.

Michelangelo's David was carved from marble quarried where?

It was meant for the cathedral gable as a symbol of Florentine freedom.

Along with another great painter of the age, Michelangelo was enrolled in which lay religious body?

His faith deepened late in life; a 1554 poem says neither painting nor sculpture could any longer calm his soul.

Michelangelo's biographer Paolo Giovio blamed what for the artist leaving no pupils to follow him?

Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink; he was by nature solitary and melancholy.