Michelangelo is considered by many art experts to be the greatest Renaissance artist, surpassing even Leonardo da Vinci. Not only was he an exceptional sculptor but also a formidable painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo’s primary material was marble and the results of his talent and work speak for themselves: Can anything compare to his statue of David or the Pietà he carved at the age of 24? Michelangelo lived to be 88 years old, and he worked until the very end of his life. His last project, inspired by the success of his fresco paintings on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, even though he had never painted as much as a tile before that commission, was the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Rome. Unfortunately, he died before the work was completed. As a teenager, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the Medici family sculpture workshops. Impressed by the young prodigy, he was soon asked to live and study in the palace of Lorenzo de’ Medici, one of the leading cultural centers in Italy, where he was educated alongside de’ Medici’s own children. Later in his career, Michelangelo was given permission by the church to study the remains of the dead from which he acquired a near-perfect understanding of the human body as he portrayed it in his sculptures, paintings, and drawings. A complicated man, Michelangelo lived his life in constant emotional turmoil and agony, misunderstood by virtually everyone around him.
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