Michelangelo and the Medici
Michelangelo (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) had a complicated relationship with the Medici family, who were for most of his lifetime the effective rulers of his home city of Florence.
Michelangelo's first contact with the Medici family began early as a talented teenage apprentice of the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.
Michelangelo's father sent him to study grammar with the Renaissance humanist Francesco da Urbino in Florence as a young boy.
[1] The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters.
[2] When Michelangelo was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time.
[5] Consequently, both Michelangelo's outlook and his art were subject to the influence of many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Angelo Poliziano.
Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna,[6] where he stayed for more than a year.
Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome.
[1] This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.
[6] During the half year he spent in Florence he worked on two small statues, an infant Saint John the Baptist and a Sleeping Cupid.
Since Leo was a Medici, one of the projects that naturally occurred to him was the decoration of the unfinished front of his family's church, San Lorenzo, in Florence.
In anticipation of the project, he went out the quarries in Carrara, Italy to excavate granite and he spent two years building the road to it, supervising the extraction, and transporting the marble to Florence.
[9] 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 were specifically for the project.
[10] Ironically, the most prominent tombs are those of two rather obscure Medici who died young, a son and grandson of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
Lorenzo himself is buried in an unfinished and comparatively unimpressive tomb on one of the side walls of the chapel, not given a free-standing monument, as originally intended.
As with Leo X, Michelangelo was educated alongside Clement VII and for many years, the two communicated in great detail both via letter and in person.
[13] Despite that Clement VII was an illegitimate child, he became an archbishop via papal dispensation, in which Leo X stipulated that his parents had been secretly married.
In this project, Michelangelo produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.
[9] Mere days before his own death, Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.
[8] Years later his body was brought back from Rome for interment at the Basilica di Santa Croce, fulfilling his last request to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.
