---
node: michelangelo
type: person
slug: michelangelo
title: "Michelangelo"
lead: "Michelangelo was a Florentine sculptor, painter, and architect of the High Renaissance."
published: 2026-07-11
updated: 2026-08-27
change: "Rewrote the opening body section so that it no longer restates the page's own lead."
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requester: internal
reason: "The section repeated the lead, so the first thing under the first heading was text the reader had already read in the search result."
image_file: michelangelo.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_Daniele_da_Volterra.jpg"
image_author: "Attributed to Daniele da Volterra"
image_license: "Public domain"
---

## Who they were

Born at Caprese in Tuscany in 1475 and raised in Florence, he was apprenticed at thirteen to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and within a year had moved into the Medici household, learning to carve in Lorenzo de' Medici's sculpture garden. He worked for seven popes over a career of some seventy years, moving between Florence and Rome as their politics required, and wrote around three hundred poems alongside the sculpture he always called his real trade. He died in Rome in 1564, three weeks short of eighty-nine.

## What they did

He carved the David and the Pietà, painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and later its Last Judgment, and in old age served as architect of St. Peter's Basilica, designing its dome.

## Legacy

Regarded in his lifetime as divine — Il Divino — he set an enduring standard for Western art and shaped the course of sculpture, painting, and architecture.