Michelangelo (Encore)
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The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In 1475, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprizi, Italy. Over the next 88 years, he left a legacy of paintings and sculptures unlike any artist before or since. His art shaped the city he came from, the era he lived in, and eventually the entire world of Western art. Today, the works he created are some of the most treasured and valuable artworks in the entire world.

Learn more about Michelangelo and how he became the greatest artist of the Renaissance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by NerdWallet. When it comes to general knowledge and history, you know I've got you covered. But who do you turn to when you need smart financial decisions? If your answer is NerdWallet, then you're absolutely right. And if it's not, let me change your mind.

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that also happens to have the best converting checkout on the planet. And that's no industry secret. That's Shopify. Learn more at shopify.com slash enterprise. The full name of the man who was the subject of this episode is Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simone. However, for the rest of this episode, I'm just going to refer to him by the name which everyone knows him, Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was born in 1475 in the town of Caprizi in Tuscany. Shortly after his birth, his family moved back to the city which had been their home for several generations, Florence. There are times in history when a person, a time, and a place all come together perfectly, and this is one such case.

Michelangelo was unquestionably an artistic genius, who just so happened to live in the one city in the world which spawned an artistic and intellectual movement at the exact same time that movement, the Renaissance, came into full bloom.

While Michelangelo was far from the only great artist from Florence during this period, it was as if the lenses of geography, art, and history all focused their beams so they could hit this one person. Michelangelo's family was not rich, but they were also not poor. His father did have some financial problems, which is why he was in the town of Caprice when he was born and not in Florence. His mother died when he was only six years old. He was sent to live with a nanny in the town of Setiano, just outside of Florence.

The nanny's husband just so happened to own a marble quarry. It was here that he developed a love of marble, and where he learned how to shape the stone with a hammer and chisel. He was later sent to Florence for his education, in which he seemed to show absolutely no interest. He eventually secured an apprenticeship with a local artist by the name of Domenico Ghirlandaio. Ghirlandaio was a master fresco painter, a skill that Michelangelo would certainly use later in his life.

Here I should explain more about just how important Florence was to the world of art at this time. Florence in the late 15th and early 16th century was like Vienna in the late 18th century for classical music, or what Silicon Valley is to technology today. Florence was the place to be for art. And if you don't know art very well, let me put it in a way that you might understand. All of the namesakes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lived and worked in Florence sometime around this period.

Michelangelo quickly found success. At the age of 14, he was being paid by Ghirlandaio, which was almost unheard of for an apprentice.

The de facto ruler of Florence and the premier patron of artists, Lorenzo de' Medici, then invited Michelangelo to live at a room in his palace. Michelangelo participated in the informal Platonic Academy of Florence, where philosophers and intellectuals of the era would congregate to discuss ideas. At the age of 15, he started to create works that made people take notice. He began carving marble reliefs. One of his first works was the Madonna of the Steps. It

It's not at the same level as his later work, but you can tell that there is an immense talent there and that this wasn't the work of a normal 15-year-old. Unfortunately, Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492, and there was a religious revival in Florence which resulted in Michelangelo leaving for several years. He bounced around Venice and Bologna working on small art projects before returning to Florence in 1495 at the age of 20. Here he got caught up in a scandal when he created the sculpture of St. John the Baptist for one of the lesser members of the Medici family.

The Medici made Michelangelo rough up the sculpture a bit so it looked like an ancient Greek statue that was dug up so they could sell it for more money. The scam was discovered, but the statue's buyer, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, was so impressed with the work that he invited Michelangelo to Rome.

It was here that he was commissioned by a French cardinal to create a Pieta. A Pieta, generically, is an image showing Mary cradling the body of Jesus after he was taken down from the cross. Michelangelo finished the sculpture in 1499 when he was only 24 years old. It was immediately seen as one of the greatest sculptures of all time.

In my opinion, this is Michelangelo's greatest work. It's on display at the Vatican inside of St. Peter's Basilica, and seeing this sculpture is worth visiting St. Peter's all by itself.

Creating this at the age of 24 was like Orson Welles making Citizen Kane when he was 25, or Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at the age of 18, or Prince's first album, where he wrote, produced, arranged, and played every instrument on every song at the age of 19. One thing I should note about the Pieta is that in 1972, a deranged Australian geologist by the name of Laszlo Toth attacked the statue with a geologist hammer, shouting, I am Jesus Christ, I have risen from the dead.

He hit the statue 15 times, knocking Mary's arm and nose off. They did a masterful restoration of the sculpture, and you can now barely tell that there was any damage ever done to it. If you go to see the Pieta in person, and you should, this is why you will find it behind bulletproof glass.

With the Pieta under his belt, Michelangelo was now getting bigger commissions. He returned to Florence in 1501 and was given the commission to create a sculpture for the Florence Cathedral. It was originally designed to be one of 12 sculptures with an Old Testament theme. The subject Michelangelo chose for the sculpture was the biblical King David. He was given a gigantic block of marble, purchased the year he was born, and had gone unused.

He was given the contract at the age of 26 over many other older, more well-established sculptors. He spent two years working on it, and the final product was 5.17 meters, or 17 feet tall. It was so good that it was moved to a prominent position outside the Palazzo Vecchio, which was the Florence City Hall. And it remained there from 1503 to 1873, when it was moved indoors to its current location at the Galleria della Accademia.

With these two major wins, he began to get more and more attention, and more contracts for smaller projects. In 1505, however, he got the attention of the man who was probably the biggest patron of art there could possibly be in Italy, Pope Julius II. Julius wanted Michelangelo to build a massive tomb for him that would have 40 statues, and he wanted it done in five years.

The problem was that Julius wanted Michelangelo to do a whole bunch of other stuff which took his focus away from the tomb. The two fought constantly, and Michelangelo even left Rome for a spell and returned to Florence. In 1508, Julian asked Michelangelo to paint a fresco on the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

I previously did an entire episode on the Sistine Chapel, so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but Michelangelo basically got permission to paint his own vision rather than what the Pope originally wanted. And the result was the sealing of the Sistine Chapel. It took him four years to complete, and it was finished in 1512.

Your assignment for this episode is to go and watch the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy. Charlton Heston plays Michelangelo, and Rex Harrison plays Julius II. I checked, and it is available to rent on Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend it. Soon after the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Julius II died in 1513 without his tomb being completed.

In 1513, Michelangelo was now 38 years old and already had a first ballot hall of fame career. He could have never made another thing in his life and still have gone down as one of the greatest artists of all time. Julius' replacement was Leo X, who just so happened to have been the son of his former patron, Lorenzo de' Medici. He was commissioned to continue working on the Tomb of Julius, which he did for several years until politics got in the way.

He was then commissioned by the Medici family to create a façade for the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence. It was never built due to a lack of funds, but the wooden models of it that Michelangelo created still exist. And there's still debate about finishing Michelangelo's design for the façade today, over 500 years after he designed it. He also designed what's known as the Medici Chapel inside San Lorenzo's. After a revolution and a series of political upheavals in Florence, he moved back to Rome in 1534.

In Rome, he was commissioned by the now Pope Clement VII to create another fresco for the Sistine Chapel. This time, it was to be a depiction of the Last Judgment, which would appear on the altar wall. The image depicts the souls of the dead either ascending into heaven or descending into hell. It took him seven years to complete the fresco, which was highly controversial because of the nudity, especially the fact that Mary and Jesus were depicted without clothing.

The genitals on the painting were eventually painted over shortly before Michelangelo's death by one of his assistants, Daniele da Volterra. After the completion of the Last Judgment, he also received two more commissions for frescoes in the Vatican, which are not as well known, the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of Saul. They're both located inside the Vatican Palace, so they're seldom seen by the public.

After this, he began receiving architectural commissions. In particular, in 1546, he was appointed as the head architect for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Construction in the church had been underway for 50 years, and the original design was not Michelangelo's. He was actually the third person appointed to the position. By the time Michelangelo was appointed, the main thing which had been built were the four giant piers that were designed to support the dome. So there was still a lot of room to determine the final outcome of what the church would look like.

Michelangelo stuck with the original design created by Donato Bramante, but made the entire building more cohesive. Michelangelo's biggest contribution is in many ways the biggest and most important part of St. Peter's, the dome. The dome's design was Michelangelo's, and he lived long enough to see the beginning of the dome's construction. The dome of St. Peter's is still today, almost 500 years later, the largest dome in the world as measured by its inner height.

The Dome of St. Peter's has been considered the greatest work of the entire Renaissance. In addition to the sculptures, the paintings, and the architecture, he was also a poet. He wrote over 300 poems that have survived, although the quality of his poetry pales in comparison to his other works. He even continued working on the tomb of Julius II for most of his life, although he was never truly satisfied with the outcome.

It was much smaller than originally planned, and it wasn't placed in St. Peter's, but rather in the Church of San Petro in Vincoli in Rome. Michelangelo passed away in 1564 at the age of 88. He left behind an incredible legacy of art, both in terms of quantity and quality of his work. And I've only touched upon a few of his greatest works in this episode.

The true greatness of Michelangelo can probably be best seen in the fact that 500 years later, there are still millions of people who are willing to go out of their way to witness his genius. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.