Michelangelo Dies: Renaissance Master's Legacy Endures

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni died in Rome on February 18, 1564, at age eighty-eight, still serving as the chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica. He had held that position for seventeen years, working without salary, and the dome he designed was not completed until decades after his death. He sculpted the Pieta before he was twenty-five, producing a work of such technical perfection that critics initially refused to believe it was the product of a young unknown, and he carved his name across the Madonna's sash in response. David, standing seventeen feet tall in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, was finished when he was twenty-nine. Pope Julius II commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508, a project Michelangelo accepted reluctantly because he considered himself a sculptor, not a painter. He spent four years on scaffolding, working largely alone, painting more than 300 figures across 5,000 square feet of ceiling. Twenty-three years later, he returned to the same chapel to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall, a work whose depictions of nude figures provoked censorship campaigns that continued for decades after his death. As an architect, he pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library in Florence and fundamentally redesigned St. Peter's, transforming a project that had stalled under previous architects into the building that defines the Vatican skyline. He thought of himself primarily as a sculptor throughout his life. The most influential painter of the Renaissance considered painting his second skill.