Questions to ask Michelangelo

Michelangelo's life, briefly

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 at Caprese, in Tuscany, and grew up in Florence. At 13 he was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, and soon afterwards he lived in the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, studying ancient sculpture. He worked for the Medici and for a series of popes for about seventy years, as sculptor, painter, architect and poet. He died in Rome on 18 February 1564, aged 88, and his body was carried secretly to Florence for burial in the church of Santa Croce.

He left about 300 poems and hundreds of letters, and in 1553 his pupil Ascanio Condivi published a Life of Michelangelo that the artist effectively approved. Giorgio Vasari wrote another, in the 1550 and 1568 editions of his Lives of the Artists. These are your main sources, and they don't always agree.

How to use this list

Choose one or two works and go deep, rather than skimming them all. Teachers reward specific answers: the size of the marble block, the year, who paid, what went wrong. For a wax museum, David and the Sistine ceiling are the obvious poses; prepare a 30 second answer on how the ceiling was really painted, because most visitors believe he lay on his back.

You can rehearse by voice with an AI recreation of Michelangelo on Yuga, built from his letters, poems and the historical record. It is not the man, it can be wrong, and your project should cite his letters, Condivi and Vasari rather than the app.

The early works: the Pietà and David

What the record says: in Rome he carved the Pietà (1498 to 1499) for a French cardinal; it is the only work he signed, on the sash across the Virgin's chest. Vasari says he added the signature after hearing visitors credit it to another sculptor. Back in Florence he carved David (1501 to 1504) from a tall block of marble that other sculptors had started and abandoned decades earlier. It was set up outside the Palazzo Vecchio in 1504 as a symbol of the Florentine republic, and moved indoors to the Accademia in 1873.

1. How did a Cupid you carved, sold as an ancient statue, bring you to Rome?
2. Why did you make the Virgin in your Pietà look so young?
3. Did you really carve your name on the Pietà after hearing someone credit another sculptor?
4. What was wrong with the block of marble that became David?
5. Why did you show David before the fight rather than after it?
6. Who decided where David should stand, and did you agree?

The Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508 to 1512

What the record says: Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling in 1508. Michelangelo designed his own scaffolding and painted standing, bending backward, not lying down. He described the misery of it in a comic sonnet to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia, ending with the words “né io pittore”, “nor am I a painter”. Condivi reports that he believed the architect Bramante and the painter Raphael encouraged the commission hoping he would fail at fresco.

1. Did you paint the ceiling lying on your back?
2. Why did you say you were not a painter?
3. Why do you think you were given a painting job instead of sculpture?
4. How did you learn fresco well enough to paint a whole ceiling?
5. How did you plan more than 300 figures across the ceiling?
6. Why did you choose to show the Creation of Adam with the fingers almost touching?
7. What did Pope Julius II do when you were slow?

The tomb that never ended

What the record says: Julius II ordered a huge tomb with about forty statues in 1505. After the pope's death in 1513 the contracts were redrawn again and again, and a much smaller version, with the seated Moses, was finally installed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome in 1545. Condivi called it the tragedy of the tomb. The unfinished “Prisoners” or “Slaves” statues, now in Florence and Paris, were made for it.

1. Why did you call the tomb of Julius II a tragedy?
2. Why are some of your statues for it left half out of the stone?
3. Why does your Moses have horns?

The horns come from a Latin translation of the Bible (Exodus 34) that describes Moses' face as “horned” where other readings say “shining”, a long tradition in art.

The Last Judgement, St Peter's and old age

What the record says: he painted the Last Judgement on the chapel's altar wall from 1536 to 1541 for Pope Paul III. Vasari reports that when the papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, objected to the nudes, Michelangelo painted him into hell as Minos with donkey's ears. The flayed skin held by St Bartholomew is widely read as a self portrait. After the Council of Trent, draperies were added in 1565. From 1546 he was chief architect of St Peter's, and the dome was completed after his death. Days before his death he was still carving a Pietà, now called the Rondanini Pietà and kept in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Letters and poems from the 1530s and 1540s show close friendships with the young nobleman Tommaso de' Cavalieri and the poet Vittoria Colonna.

1. Why did you paint Biagio da Cesena in hell?
2. Is the face in St Bartholomew's skin your own?
3. How did you feel when other painters were told to cover your nudes?
4. Why did you agree, in your seventies, to take charge of St Peter's?
5. What did your friendship with Vittoria Colonna mean to you?
6. Why did you burn many of your drawings before you died?
7. Why were you still carving a Pietà in the last days of your life?

Treat questions about Cavalieri with care: the poems are intense, and historians read them in different ways. Avoid modern labels and let the letters speak.

What Michelangelo said, and what he didn't

Q: Which is better, painting or sculpture? In a letter to the historian Benedetto Varchi in 1547 he answered, in substance, that painting is better the more it approaches relief, and relief worse the more it approaches painting, and that sculpture is the lantern of painting.

Q: What did you write to Cavalieri when you first knew him?

Q: What did you think about art at the end of your life? His late sonnet beginning “Giunto è già 'l corso della vita mia” (“The course of my life has now arrived”), written about 1552 to 1554, says art had been his idol and that neither painting nor carving can now quiet a soul turned to divine love.

Now the warning. The most quoted Michelangelo line on the internet, about seeing an angel in the marble and carving until he set it free, has no known source in his letters, poems or the early biographies. Neither does “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high”. Don't use either as his words. Our guide on how to check if a quote is real shows how to test lines like these.

Questions to avoid

He could not comment on the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling (1980 to 1994), which revealed much brighter colours, or on modern theories that hidden anatomy, such as a brain, is painted into the Creation of Adam. He knew Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, so ask about them; but he cannot tell you about later artists who copied him. See Leonardo vs Michelangelo for their rivalry.

Sources to read

• Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo (1553), the closest thing to his own account.
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, life of Michelangelo (1550 and 1568).
• The Letters of Michelangelo, translated by E. H. Ramsden (2 volumes, 1963).
• The poems (Rime), in translations such as those by James M. Saslow (1991).
• Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (2003), on the Sistine years.
• The Vatican Museums' website, for the Sistine Chapel; the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, which holds many letters and drawings.

He features in our pages on Renaissance key figures and famous painters in history.