Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475 to 1564) was a Florentine sculptor, painter, and architect whose work in marble, including the David and the Pieta, and in fresco, above all the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, made him one of the most influential artists of the Italian Renaissance. Trained in Florence and steeped in the study of classical sculpture and human anatomy, Michelangelo regarded himself first as a sculptor and approached even his painting with a sculptor's attention to the modeled human body. His David, carved from a single block of marble between 1501 and 1504 for the city of Florence, became an emblem of Florentine civic pride, while the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted for Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512, remains one of the most studied works in Western art. In his later years he turned increasingly to architecture, designing the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, left incomplete at his death and finished largely to his design by later architects. Michelangelo worked well into his eighties, and his long career is often divided by art historians into distinct phases reflecting the shifting artistic and political climate of Renaissance and Counter Reformation Italy.