Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo Buonarroti worked as sculptor, painter, architect and poet across seventy years, and considered only the first of those his real trade. Born near Arezzo in 1475 to minor Florentine gentry who thought stonecutting beneath them, he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio at thirteen and soon taken into the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, where he studied antique sculpture and dissected corpses at Santo Spirito to learn anatomy. The Pietà, carved in Rome by 1499 when he was twenty-four, is the only work he signed — reportedly after hearing it attributed to someone else. The David followed in Florence in 1501-04, cut from a damaged block another sculptor had abandoned, and was placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio as a civic symbol of the republic. Julius II summoned him to Rome in 1505 to build a papal tomb, then diverted him to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He painted it from 1508 to 1512, largely standing on scaffolding of his own design rather than lying down as legend has it, and complained in verse about his neck. He returned to the chapel almost thirty years later for the Last Judgment of 1536-41, whose nudity was painted over after his death. The tomb of Julius consumed forty years and was finished only in reduced form, its Moses the surviving centrepiece. He designed the Laurentian Library staircase and the Medici Chapel, and from 1547 served as architect of St Peter's, refusing payment and producing the dome largely as built. His late poems and the unfinished Rondanini Pietà, worked on days before his death in 1564, are stripped almost to abstraction.

• Lived: 1475 CE – 1564 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter, sculptor, architect, poet