Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known as Michelangelo, is one of the most inspired creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo da Vinci the most known painters in the Italian High Renaissance.

Michelangelo was a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet. Alone he exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on Western art in general.

>Born 1475, in the small village of Caprese, Michelangelo, a Florentine, continued to have a deep attachment to his city, art, and culture throughout his long life. He spent the greater part of his adulthood in Rome, employed by popes.

Michelangelo studied at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens and was invited into the household of Lorenzo de' Medici. He produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, showing he had achieved his own style at a very early age. Two years later, Lorenzo died in 1492 and Michelangelo fled Florence to Bologna where he executed several sculptures for the Arca or Shrine in the Church of San Domenico.

After returning to Florence, between 1501 and 1504, he produced the great statue of "David". While still occupied with the David, Michelangelo was given an opportunity to paint a commissioned mural, the Battle of Cascina destined to be opposite of Leonardo da Vinci's "Battle of Anghiari". Neither artist carried his assignment beyond the stage of a cartoon.

Michelangelo created a series of nude and clothed figures in a wide variety of poses and positions that were a prelude to his next major project, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

In 1505, Michelangelo was called to Rome by Pope Julius II for two commissions. The most important one was for the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Working high above the chapel floor, lying on his back on scaffolding, Michelangelo painted, between 1508 and 1512, some of the finest pictorial images of all time.

After many commissions and sculptures, Michelangelo, the greatest artist of all time, died in 1564.