Michelangelo Was Born
On this day · 6 March 1475
On a March morning in a small Tuscan hill town, the Renaissance gained the sculptor who would carve the David and paint the Sistine ceiling.
On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in Caprese, a small village in the hills of Tuscany, near Arezzo. His father served as the local administrator there, and within months the family returned to its permanent home in Florence — the city that would shape the artist’s life and ambitions.
Apprenticed first to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and later drawn into the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo trained in both painting and sculpture but considered himself, above all, a sculptor. Before he turned thirty he had completed two of the most celebrated works in Western art: the marble Pietà for St. Peter’s and the towering David.
Praised in his own lifetime as il divino — “the divine one.”
Between 1508 and 1512 he painted the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, a feat that crowned his reputation. Painter, sculptor, architect and poet, Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564, having reshaped the course of Renaissance art.
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