The Florentine sculptor, painter, and architect whose David, Pietà, and Sistine Chapel ceiling set a standard of human grandeur the West has measured itself against ever since — one of the supreme artists of the Italian Renaissance, who thought of himself first as a man who freed living figures from stone.
Michelangelo was almost ninety when he died, and to the end he called himself a sculptor before anything else. He believed a finished figure already lay inside the block of marble, and that his work was only to cut away the stone that hid it. He proved the claim young. In his twenties he carved the Pietà, the dead Christ across his mother's lap, with skin and cloth so soft in stone that visitors refused to believe one hand had done it. Then came the David, a single towering block turned into a tense, watchful giant. The world called him divine while he still lived. He spent four years standing on scaffolding, head bent back beneath a ceiling he never wanted to paint, and made the most famous image of God in Western art. He gave marble breath and stone a soul, and the West has measured its idea of human greatness against him ever since.