Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564),commonly known as Michelangelo , was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.[1] Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time.[1] A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence.[1] His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At the age of 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification. In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive.[2] Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one").[3] One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate[4] Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance. Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475[a] in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany.[5] (Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo). For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence, the bank had failed and his father, Ludovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni, briefly took a government post in Caprese, where Michelangelo was born.[2] At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena.[6] The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa; this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it.[7] Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where Michelangelo was raised. At later times, during his mother's prolonged illness and after her death in 1481, when he was just six years old, Michelangelo lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm.[6] Giorgio Vasari quotes Michelangelo: "If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures."[5] As a young boy Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino.[5][8][b] The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters.[8] The city of Florence was at that time the greatest centre of the arts and learning in Italy.[9] Art was sponsored by the Signoria (the town council), by the merchant guilds and by wealthy patrons such as the Medici and their banking associates.[10] The Renaissance, a renewal of Classical scholarship and the arts, had its first flowering in Florence.[9] In the early 1400s, the architect Brunelleschi has studied the remains of Classical buildings in Rome and created two churches, San Lorenzo's and Santo Spiritu, which embodied the Classical precepts.[11] The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had laboured for fifty years to create the bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo was to describe as "The Gates of Paradise".[12] The exterior niches of the Church of Or' San Michele contained a gallery of works by the greatest sculptors of Florence, Donatello, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco.[10] The interiors of the older churches were covered with frescos, mostly in the Late Medieval style, but also in the Early Renaissance style, begun by Giotto and continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, both of whose works Michelangelo studied and copied in drawings.[13] During Michelangelo's childhood, a team of painters had been called from Florence to the Vatican, in order to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master of the technique of fresco painting, of perspective, figure drawing and portraiture. He had the largest workshop in Florence, at that period.[10] In 1488, at thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio.[14] When he was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time.[15] When in 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.[16] From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Humanist academy which the Medici had founded along Neo Platonic lines. At the academy, 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 Poliziano.[17] At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492).[13] The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici.[18] Michelangelo worked for a time with the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. When he was seventeen, another pupil, Pietro Torrigiano, struck him on the nose, causing the disfigurement which is conspicuous in all the portraits of Michelangelo.[19]