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Michelangelo (full name Michelangelo di Lodovico
Buonarroti Simoni) (March 6, 1475 - February 18,
1564) was a Renaissance sculpture|sculptor,
architect, painting|painter, and poet.



== Life history ==
Michelangelo was born near Arezzo, in Caprese
Michelangelo|Caprese, Tuscany, Italy in 1475. His
father, Lodovico, was the resident magistrate in
Caprese. As genealogies of the day indicated that
the Buonarroti descended from Countess Matilda of
Tuscany, the family was considered minor nobility.
 However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence,
Italy|Florence and later lived with a sculptor and
his wife in the town of Settignano,
Italy|Settignano where his father owned a marble
quarry and a small farm. Michelangelo once said to
the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, "What
good I have comes from the pure air of your native
Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and
hammers with my nurse's milk."

Against his father's wishes, Michelangelo chose to
be the apprentice of Domenico Ghirlandaio for
three years starting in 1488. Impressed, Domenico
recommended him to the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo
de' Medici. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo
attended Lorenzo's school and was influenced by
many prominent people who modified and expanded
his ideas on art and even his feelings about
sexuality. It was during this period that
Michelangelo created two reliefs: Battle of the
Centaurs and Madonna of the Steps.  


After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, Piero di
Lorenzo de' Medici|Piero de' Medici (Lorenzo's
oldest son and new head of the Medici family),
refused to support Michelangelo's artwork. Also at
that time, the ideas of Savonarola became popular
in Florence. Under those two pressures,
Michelangelo decided to leave Florence and stay in
Bologna, Italy|Bologna for three years. Soon
afterwards, Cardinal San Giorgio purchased
Michelangelo's marble Michelangelo's Cupid|Cupid
and decided to summon him to Rome in 1496.
Influenced by Roman antiquity, he produced the
Michelangelo's Bacchus |Bacchus and the
Michelangelo's Pietà|Pietà.  

Four years later, Michelangelo returned to
Florence where he produced arguably his most
famous work, the marble Michelangelo's
David|David. He also painted the Holy Family of
the Tribune.

Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome in 1503 by
the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was
commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However,
under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had
to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to
accomplish numerous other tasks. The most famous
of those were the monumental paintings on the
ceiling of the Vatican City|Vatican's Sistine
Chapel which took four years (1508 - 1512) to
complete. Due to those and later interruptions,
Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years
without ever finishing it.

In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope
Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to
reconstruct the façade of the Basilica di San
Lorenzo di Firenze|basilica of San Lorenzo in
Florence and to adorn it with sculptures.
Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years
he spent in creating drawings and models for the
facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble
quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the
project, were among the most frustrating in his
career, as work was abruptly cancelled by his
financially-strapped patrons before any real
progress had been made.  

Apparently not the least embarassed by this
turnabout, the Medici later came back to
Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this
time for a family funerary chapel in the basilica
of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this
project, occupying the artist for much of the
1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. Though
still incomplete, it is the best example we have
of the integration of the artist's scuptural and
architectural vision, since Michelangleo created
both the major sculptures as well as the interior
plan.  Ironically the most prominent tombs are
those of two rather obscure Medici who died young,
a son and grandson of Lorenzo. Lorenzo de'
Medici|Il Magnifico himself is buried in an
obscure corner of the chapel, not given a
free-standing monument, as originally intended.


In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by
the sack of Rome (1527)|sack of Rome, threw out
the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of
the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid
of his beloved Florence by working on the city's
fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in
1530 and the Medici were restored to power.
Completely out of sympathy with the repressive
reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left
Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving
assistants to complete the Medici chapel.  Years
later his body was brought back from Rome for
interment, fufilling the maestro's last request to
be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall
of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope
Paul III, and Michelangelo worked on it from 1534
to 1541. Then in 1546, Michelangelo was appointed
architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican,
and designed its dome.

On February 18 1564, Michelangelo died in Rome at
the age of 89. His life was described in Giorgio
Vasari's "Vite". 

When the work was finished on The Last Judgment in
(October 1541), Michelangelo was accused of
intolerable obscenity for his depictions of naked
figures showing genitals (and inside the private
chapel of the Pope). A violent censorship campaign
was organized by Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor
Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) to remove the
frescoes, but the Pope resisted.  
In coincidence with Michelangelo's death, a law
was issued to cover genitals ("Pictura in Cappella
Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an
apprentice of Michelangelo, covered with sort of
perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered
the complex of bodies (see details
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/art/m/michelan/3sistina/
lastjudg/0lastjud.jpg). 
When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers
chose not to remove the perizomas of Daniele;
however, a faithful uncensored copy of the
original, by Marcello Venusti, is now in Naples,
at the Capodimonte Museum.
Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once
described as "inventor delle porcherie" (inventor
of obscenities, in a sense that in Italian sounds
like he had created genitals). The "fig-leaf
campaign" of the Counter Reformation to cover all
representations of human genitals in paintings and
sculptures started with Michelangelo's works. To
give two examples, the bronze statue of "Cristo
della Minerva" (church of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva, Rome) was covered, as it remains today,
and the statue of the naked child Jesus in
"Madonna of Bruges" (Belgium) remained covered for
several decades. A similar campaign occurred in
Victorian Britain. Even today, the genital of
'David' in the Victoria and Albert Museum still
gets covered with a stone fig leaf during royal
visits.

==Michelangelo the architect==

===Laurentian Library===

Around 1530 Michaelangelo designed the Laurentian
Library in Florence, attached to the church of San
Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters
tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase
with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

===Medici Chapel===

===Palazzo Farnese, Rome|Palazzo Farnese===

===St Peter's Basilica===

=== Michelangelo at the Campidoglio ===
Michelangelo's first designs for solving the
intractable urbanistic, symbolic, political and
propaganda program for the Campidoglio dated from
1536. The commission was from the Farnese Pope
Paul III, who wanted a symbol of the new Rome to
impress Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was
expected in 1538.  The hill was the Capitoline
Hill|Capitoline, the heart of pagan Rome, though
that connection was largely obscured by its other
role as the center of the civic government of
Rome, revived as a commune in the 11th century.
The city's government was now to be firmly in
papal control, but the Campidoglio was the former
scene of many movements of urban resistance, such
as the dramatic scenes of Cola di Rienzi's revived
republic. Approximately in the middle, not to
Michelangelo's liking, now stood the only
equestrian bronze to have survived since
Antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher
emperor. He apparently owed his survival largely
because popular culture had mistaken him for
Constantine I (emperor)|Constantine the Great,
revered as the first Christian emperor by plebs
and popes alike. Michelangelo provided an
unassuming pedestal for it.

It was slow work: little was actually completed in
Michelangelo's lifetime, but work continued
faithfully to his designs and the Campidoglio was
completed in the 17th century, except for the
paving design.  

Michelangelo provided new fronts to the two
official buildings of Rome's civic government,
which very approximately faced each other, the
Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Senatore,
which had been built over the Tabularium that had
once housed the archives of ancient Rome, and
which now houses the Capitoline Museums, the
oldest museum of antiquities. Michelangelo devised
a monumental stair (the "Cordonata") to reach the
high piazza, so that the Campidoglio resolutely
turned its back on the Forum that it had once
commanded, and he gave the space a new building at
the far end, to close the vista. The Cordonata is
a ramped stair that can be accessed on horseback
by the sufficiently great, though it was not in
place when Emperor Charles arrived, and the
imperial party had to scramble up the slope from
the Forum to view the works in progress. The
unfolding sequence, Cordonata piazza and the
central palazzo are the first urban introduction
of the "cult of the axis" that will occupy Italian
garden plans and reach fruition in France (Giedion
1962).

The Palazzo dei Conservatori was the first use of
a giant order that spanned two storeys, here with
a range of Corinthian order|Corinthian pilasters
and subsidiary Ionic order|Ionic columns flanking
the ground-floor loggia openings and the second
floor windows. Another giant order would serve
later for the exterior of St Peter's. A balustrade
punctuated by sculptures atop the giant pilasters
capped the composition, one of the most
influential of Michelangelo's designs. The sole
arched motif in the entire design are the
segmental pediments over the windows, which give a
slight spring to the completely angular
vertical-horizontal balance of the design. 


The bird's-eye view of the engraving by Étienne
Dupérac shows Michelangelo's solution to the
problems of the space in the Piazza del
Campidoglio. Even with their new facades centering
them on the new palazzo at the rear, the space was
a trapezoid, and the facades did not face each
other squarely. Worse than that, the whole site
sloped (to the left in the engraving).
Michelangelo's solution was radical. Since no
"perfect" forms would work, his apparent oval in
the paving is actually egg-shaped, narrower at one
end. The travertine design set into the paving is
perfectly level: around its perimeter, low steps
arise and die away into the paving as the slope
requires. Its center springs slightly, so that one
senses that one is standing on the exposed segment
of a gigantic egg all but buried at the center of
the city at the center of the world, as
Michelangelo's historian Charles de Tolnay pointed
out (Charles De Tolnay, 1930). An interlaced
twelve-pointed star makes a subtle reference to
the constellations, revolving around this space
called Caput mundi, the "head of the world".  

The paving design was never executed by the popes,
who may have detected a subtext of
less-than-Christian import. Benito Mussolini
ordered the paving completed to Michelangelo's
design— in 1940.

== Michelangelo the man ==

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others
and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought
that art originated from inner inspiration and
from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his
rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature
as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures
that he created are therefore in forceful
movement; each is in its own space apart from the
outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the
sculptor is to free the forms that, he believed,
were already inside the stone. This can most
vividly be seen in his unfinished statuary
figures, which to many appear to be struggling to
free themselves from the stone.  

He also instilled into his figures a sense of
moral cause for action. A good example of this can
be seen in the facial expression of his most
famous work, the marble statue Michelangelo's
David|David. Arguably his second most famous work
is the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
which is a synthesis of architecture, sculpture &
painting. His Last Judgement, also in the Sistine
Chapel, is a depiction of extreme crisis.  

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's
skill, especially in sculpture, was deeply
appreciated in his own time. It is said that when
still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche
of a Roman statue (Il Putto Dormiente, the
sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection,
that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman
original. Another better-known anecdote claims
that when finishing the Moses (San Pietro in
Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the
knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why
don't you speak to me?"

===Love life===
Fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of
male beauty, which attracted him both
aesthetically and emotionally. Such feelings
caused him great anguish, and he expressed the
struggle between platonic ideals and carnal desire
in his sculpture, drawing and his poetry, too, for
among his other accomplishments Michelangelo was
the great Italian lyric poet of the 16th century. 

The sculptor loved a great many youths, many of
whom posed for him and likewise slept with him.
Some were of high birth, like the sixteen year old
Cecchino dei Bracci, a boy of exquisite beauty
whose death, only a year after their meeting in
1543, inspired the writing of forty eight funeral
epigrams. Others were street wise and took
advantage of the sculptor. Febbo di Poggio, in
1532, peddled his charms - in answer to 
Michelangelo's love poem he asks for money.
Earlier, Gherardo Perini, in 1522, had stolen from
him shamelessly.

His greatest love was Tommaso dei Cavalieri
(1516–1574), who was 16 years old when
Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. In
their first exchange of letters, January 1, 1533,
Michelangelo declares: Your lordship, only worldly
light in this age of ours, you can never be
pleased with another man's work for there is no
man who resembles you, nor one to equal you. . .
It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my
past, so as to longer be at your service. As it
is, I can only offer you my future, which is
short, for I am too old. . . That is all I have to
say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express
good will."  Cavalieri was open to the older man's
affection: I swear to return your love. Never have
I loved a man more than I love you, never have I
wished for a friendship more than I wish for
yours. He remained devoted to his lover till the
very end, holding his hand as he draws his last
breath.

Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred
sonnets and madrigals, constituting the largest
sequence of poems composed by him. Though modern
apologists hasten to assert the relationship was
merely a Platonic affection, the sonnets are the
first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue
addressed by one man to another, predating
Shakespeare's sonnets to his young friend by a
good fifty years.

:I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
:That burns me from afar and keeps itself
ice-chill;
:A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
:Which without motion moves every balance.

:::— (Michael Sullivan, translation)

The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was
obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the
Younger, published an edition of the poetry in
1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John
Addington Symonds undid this change by translating
the original sonnets into English and writing a
two-volume biography, published in 1893.

*http://www.pugzine.com/pug4/michelangelo.html
Michelangelo's Love Sonnets & Madrigals to Tommaso
de Cavalieri translated by Michael Sullivan

==See also==
*List of painters
*List of Italian painters
*List of famous Italians

==Compare==
*Michaelangelo (Ninja Turtle), a cartoon character
named after him.
*3001 Michelangelo|Asteroid 3001 Michelangelo,
named after the artist

==Further reading==

commons|Michelangelo
*Umberto Baldini, (photography Liberto Perugi),
The Sculpture of Michelangelo (Rizzoli, 1982) is
an excellent work with many fine photos, all in
black and white.
* Michael H. Hart, The 100, Carol Publishing
Group, July 1992, paperback, 576 pages, ISBN
0806513500
*Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Scultor,
Painter, Architect. Princeton University Press,
1975, page 119.
*Charles de Tolnay, "Beiträge zu den späten
Architechtonischen Projekten Michwelangelos," in
Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 1930,
p.26 noted in Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and
Architecture 1962.
*Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A
Biographical Novel of Michelangelo   Publisher:
Signet Book, paperback: 776 pages, ISBN 0451171357

==External links==
*http://www.compart-multimedia.com/virtuale/us/flo
rence/michelangelo_david.htm Michelangelo's David
in Florence virtual reality movie and pictures 
*http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/michel/michel.
html Photographs of details at the Campidoglio
*Web
reference|URL=http://michelangelo.com/buonarroti.h
tml|
title=Michelangelo Buonarroti Website|
work=Neil R. Bonner, ed., 14 December 2001,
Michelangelo.COM, Inc.|
year=2005|date=March 8
*http://www.scultura-italiana.com/Galleria/Michela
ngelo/index.html Photo Gallery of Works
*http://www.boheme-magazine.net/php/modules.php?na
me=News&file=article&sid=669 "The Michelangelo
Code", suggesting Michelangelo's coded use of his
knowledge of anatomy

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redirect|Michelangelo

Michelangelo (full name Michelangelo di Lodovico
Buonarroti Simoni) (March 6, 1475 - February 18,
1564) was a Renaissance sculpture|sculptor,
architect, painting|painter, and poet.



== Life history ==
Michelangelo was born near Arezzo, in Caprese
Michelangelo|Caprese, Tuscany, Italy in 1475. His
father, Lodovico, was the resident magistrate in
Caprese. As genealogies of the day indicated that
the Buonarroti descended from Countess Matilda of
Tuscany, the family was considered minor nobility.
 However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence,
Italy|Florence and later lived with a sculptor and
his wife in the town of Settignano,
Italy|Settignano where his father owned a marble
quarry and a small farm. Michelangelo once said to
the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, "What
good I have comes from the pure air of your native
Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and
hammers with my nurse's milk."

Against his father's wishes, Michelangelo chose to
be the apprentice of Domenico Ghirlandaio for
three years starting in 1488. Impressed, Domenico
recommended him to the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo
de' Medici. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo
attended Lorenzo's school and was influenced by
many prominent people who modified and expanded
his ideas on art and even his feelings about
sexuality. It was during this period that
Michelangelo created two reliefs: Battle of the
Centaurs and Madonna of the Steps.  


After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, Piero di
Lorenzo de' Medici|Piero de' Medici (Lorenzo's
oldest son and new head of the Medici family),
refused to support Michelangelo's artwork. Also at
that time, the ideas of Savonarola became popular
in Florence. Under those two pressures,
Michelangelo decided to leave Florence and stay in
Bologna, Italy|Bologna for three years. Soon
afterwards, Cardinal San Giorgio purchased
Michelangelo's marble Michelangelo's Cupid|Cupid
and decided to summon him to Rome in 1496.
Influenced by Roman antiquity, he produced the
Michelangelo's Bacchus |Bacchus and the
Michelangelo's Pietà|Pietà.  

Four years later, Michelangelo returned to
Florence where he produced arguably his most
famous work, the marble Michelangelo's
David|David. He also painted the Holy Family of
the Tribune.

Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome in 1503 by
the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was
commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However,
under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had
to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to
accomplish numerous other tasks. The most famous
of those were the monumental paintings on the
ceiling of the Vatican City|Vatican's Sistine
Chapel which took four years (1508 - 1512) to
complete. Due to those and later interruptions,
Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years
without ever finishing it.

In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope
Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to
reconstruct the façade of the Basilica di San
Lorenzo di Firenze|basilica of San Lorenzo in
Florence and to adorn it with sculptures.
Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years
he spent in creating drawings and models for the
facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble
quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the
project, were among the most frustrating in his
career, as work was abruptly cancelled by his
financially-strapped patrons before any real
progress had been made.  

Apparently not the least embarassed by this
turnabout, the Medici later came back to
Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this
time for a family funerary chapel in the basilica
of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this
project, occupying the artist for much of the
1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. Though
still incomplete, it is the best example we have
of the integration of the artist's scuptural and
architectural vision, since Michelangleo created
both the major sculptures as well as the interior
plan.  Ironically the most prominent tombs are
those of two rather obscure Medici who died young,
a son and grandson of Lorenzo. Lorenzo de'
Medici|Il Magnifico himself is buried in an
obscure corner of the chapel, not given a
free-standing monument, as originally intended.


In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by
the sack of Rome (1527)|sack of Rome, threw out
the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of
the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid
of his beloved Florence by working on the city's
fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in
1530 and the Medici were restored to power.
Completely out of sympathy with the repressive
reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left
Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving
assistants to complete the Medici chapel.  Years
later his body was brought back from Rome for
interment, fufilling the maestro's last request to
be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall
of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope
Paul III, and Michelangelo worked on it from 1534
to 1541. Then in 1546, Michelangelo was appointed
architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican,
and designed its dome.

On February 18 1564, Michelangelo died in Rome at
the age of 89. His life was described in Giorgio
Vasari's "Vite". 

When the work was finished on The Last Judgment in
(October 1541), Michelangelo was accused of
intolerable obscenity for his depictions of naked
figures showing genitals (and inside the private
chapel of the Pope). A violent censorship campaign
was organized by Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor
Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) to remove the
frescoes, but the Pope resisted.  
In coincidence with Michelangelo's death, a law
was issued to cover genitals ("Pictura in Cappella
Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an
apprentice of Michelangelo, covered with sort of
perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered
the complex of bodies (see details
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/art/m/michelan/3sistina/
lastjudg/0lastjud.jpg). 
When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers
chose not to remove the perizomas of Daniele;
however, a faithful uncensored copy of the
original, by Marcello Venusti, is now in Naples,
at the Capodimonte Museum.
Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once
described as "inventor delle porcherie" (inventor
of obscenities, in a sense that in Italian sounds
like he had created genitals). The "fig-leaf
campaign" of the Counter Reformation to cover all
representations of human genitals in paintings and
sculptures started with Michelangelo's works. To
give two examples, the bronze statue of "Cristo
della Minerva" (church of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva, Rome) was covered, as it remains today,
and the statue of the naked child Jesus in
"Madonna of Bruges" (Belgium) remained covered for
several decades. A similar campaign occurred in
Victorian Britain. Even today, the genital of
'David' in the Victoria and Albert Museum still
gets covered with a stone fig leaf during royal
visits.

==Michelangelo the architect==

===Laurentian Library===

Around 1530 Michaelangelo designed the Laurentian
Library in Florence, attached to the church of San
Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters
tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase
with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

===Medici Chapel===

===Palazzo Farnese, Rome|Palazzo Farnese===

===St Peter's Basilica===

=== Michelangelo at the Campidoglio ===
Michelangelo's first designs for solving the
intractable urbanistic, symbolic, political and
propaganda program for the Campidoglio dated from
1536. The commission was from the Farnese Pope
Paul III, who wanted a symbol of the new Rome to
impress Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was
expected in 1538.  The hill was the Capitoline
Hill|Capitoline, the heart of pagan Rome, though
that connection was largely obscured by its other
role as the center of the civic government of
Rome, revived as a commune in the 11th century.
The city's government was now to be firmly in
papal control, but the Campidoglio was the former
scene of many movements of urban resistance, such
as the dramatic scenes of Cola di Rienzi's revived
republic. Approximately in the middle, not to
Michelangelo's liking, now stood the only
equestrian bronze to have survived since
Antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher
emperor. He apparently owed his survival largely
because popular culture had mistaken him for
Constantine I (emperor)|Constantine the Great,
revered as the first Christian emperor by plebs
and popes alike. Michelangelo provided an
unassuming pedestal for it.

It was slow work: little was actually completed in
Michelangelo's lifetime, but work continued
faithfully to his designs and the Campidoglio was
completed in the 17th century, except for the
paving design.  

Michelangelo provided new fronts to the two
official buildings of Rome's civic government,
which very approximately faced each other, the
Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Senatore,
which had been built over the Tabularium that had
once housed the archives of ancient Rome, and
which now houses the Capitoline Museums, the
oldest museum of antiquities. Michelangelo devised
a monumental stair (the "Cordonata") to reach the
high piazza, so that the Campidoglio resolutely
turned its back on the Forum that it had once
commanded, and he gave the space a new building at
the far end, to close the vista. The Cordonata is
a ramped stair that can be accessed on horseback
by the sufficiently great, though it was not in
place when Emperor Charles arrived, and the
imperial party had to scramble up the slope from
the Forum to view the works in progress. The
unfolding sequence, Cordonata piazza and the
central palazzo are the first urban introduction
of the "cult of the axis" that will occupy Italian
garden plans and reach fruition in France (Giedion
1962).

The Palazzo dei Conservatori was the first use of
a giant order that spanned two storeys, here with
a range of Corinthian order|Corinthian pilasters
and subsidiary Ionic order|Ionic columns flanking
the ground-floor loggia openings and the second
floor windows. Another giant order would serve
later for the exterior of St Peter's. A balustrade
punctuated by sculptures atop the giant pilasters
capped the composition, one of the most
influential of Michelangelo's designs. The sole
arched motif in the entire design are the
segmental pediments over the windows, which give a
slight spring to the completely angular
vertical-horizontal balance of the design. 


The bird's-eye view of the engraving by Étienne
Dupérac shows Michelangelo's solution to the
problems of the space in the Piazza del
Campidoglio. Even with their new facades centering
them on the new palazzo at the rear, the space was
a trapezoid, and the facades did not face each
other squarely. Worse than that, the whole site
sloped (to the left in the engraving).
Michelangelo's solution was radical. Since no
"perfect" forms would work, his apparent oval in
the paving is actually egg-shaped, narrower at one
end. The travertine design set into the paving is
perfectly level: around its perimeter, low steps
arise and die away into the paving as the slope
requires. Its center springs slightly, so that one
senses that one is standing on the exposed segment
of a gigantic egg all but buried at the center of
the city at the center of the world, as
Michelangelo's historian Charles de Tolnay pointed
out (Charles De Tolnay, 1930). An interlaced
twelve-pointed star makes a subtle reference to
the constellations, revolving around this space
called Caput mundi, the "head of the world".  

The paving design was never executed by the popes,
who may have detected a subtext of
less-than-Christian import. Benito Mussolini
ordered the paving completed to Michelangelo's
design— in 1940.

== Michelangelo the man ==

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others
and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought
that art originated from inner inspiration and
from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his
rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature
as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures
that he created are therefore in forceful
movement; each is in its own space apart from the
outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the
sculptor is to free the forms that, he believed,
were already inside the stone. This can most
vividly be seen in his unfinished statuary
figures, which to many appear to be struggling to
free themselves from the stone.  

He also instilled into his figures a sense of
moral cause for action. A good example of this can
be seen in the facial expression of his most
famous work, the marble statue Michelangelo's
David|David. Arguably his second most famous work
is the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
which is a synthesis of architecture, sculpture &
painting. His Last Judgement, also in the Sistine
Chapel, is a depiction of extreme crisis.  

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's
skill, especially in sculpture, was deeply
appreciated in his own time. It is said that when
still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche
of a Roman statue (Il Putto Dormiente, the
sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection,
that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman
original. Another better-known anecdote claims
that when finishing the Moses (San Pietro in
Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the
knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why
don't you speak to me?"

===Love life===
Fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of
male beauty, which attracted him both
aesthetically and emotionally. Such feelings
caused him great anguish, and he expressed the
struggle between platonic ideals and carnal desire
in his sculpture, drawing and his poetry, too, for
among his other accomplishments Michelangelo was
the great Italian lyric poet of the 16th century. 

The sculptor loved a great many youths, many of
whom posed for him and likewise slept with him.
Some were of high birth, like the sixteen year old
Cecchino dei Bracci, a boy of exquisite beauty
whose death, only a year after their meeting in
1543, inspired the writing of forty eight funeral
epigrams. Others were street wise and took
advantage of the sculptor. Febbo di Poggio, in
1532, peddled his charms - in answer to 
Michelangelo's love poem he asks for money.
Earlier, Gherardo Perini, in 1522, had stolen from
him shamelessly.

His greatest love was Tommaso dei Cavalieri
(1516–1574), who was 16 years old when
Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. In
their first exchange of letters, January 1, 1533,
Michelangelo declares: Your lordship, only worldly
light in this age of ours, you can never be
pleased with another man's work for there is no
man who resembles you, nor one to equal you. . .
It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my
past, so as to longer be at your service. As it
is, I can only offer you my future, which is
short, for I am too old. . . That is all I have to
say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express
good will."  Cavalieri was open to the older man's
affection: I swear to return your love. Never have
I loved a man more than I love you, never have I
wished for a friendship more than I wish for
yours. He remained devoted to his lover till the
very end, holding his hand as he draws his last
breath.

Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred
sonnets and madrigals, constituting the largest
sequence of poems composed by him. Though modern
apologists hasten to assert the relationship was
merely a Platonic affection, the sonnets are the
first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue
addressed by one man to another, predating
Shakespeare's sonnets to his young friend by a
good fifty years.

:I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
:That burns me from afar and keeps itself
ice-chill;
:A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
:Which without motion moves every balance.

:::— (Michael Sullivan, translation)

The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was
obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the
Younger, published an edition of the poetry in
1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John
Addington Symonds undid this change by translating
the original sonnets into English and writing a
two-volume biography, published in 1893.

*http://www.pugzine.com/pug4/michelangelo.html
Michelangelo's Love Sonnets & Madrigals to Tommaso
de Cavalieri translated by Michael Sullivan

==See also==
*List of painters
*List of Italian painters
*List of famous Italians

==Compare==
*Michaelangelo (Ninja Turtle), a cartoon character
named after him.
*3001 Michelangelo|Asteroid 3001 Michelangelo,
named after the artist

==Further reading==

commons|Michelangelo
*Umberto Baldini, (photography Liberto Perugi),
The Sculpture of Michelangelo (Rizzoli, 1982) is
an excellent work with many fine photos, all in
black and white.
* Michael H. Hart, The 100, Carol Publishing
Group, July 1992, paperback, 576 pages, ISBN
0806513500
*Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Scultor,
Painter, Architect. Princeton University Press,
1975, page 119.
*Charles de Tolnay, "Beiträge zu den späten
Architechtonischen Projekten Michwelangelos," in
Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 1930,
p.26 noted in Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and
Architecture 1962.
*Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A
Biographical Novel of Michelangelo   Publisher:
Signet Book, paperback: 776 pages, ISBN 0451171357

==External links==
*http://www.compart-multimedia.com/virtuale/us/flo
rence/michelangelo_david.htm Michelangelo's David
in Florence virtual reality movie and pictures 
*http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/michel/michel.
html Photographs of details at the Campidoglio
*Web
reference|URL=http://michelangelo.com/buonarroti.h
tml|
title=Michelangelo Buonarroti Website|
work=Neil R. Bonner, ed., 14 December 2001,
Michelangelo.COM, Inc.|
year=2005|date=March 8
*http://www.scultura-italiana.com/Galleria/Michela
ngelo/index.html Photo Gallery of Works
*http://www.boheme-magazine.net/php/modules.php?na
me=News&file=article&sid=669 "The Michelangelo
Code", suggesting Michelangelo's coded use of his
knowledge of anatomy