I Am Michelangelo, and This Is the Story of My Life

I am Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and, above all, a stubborn, restless, tormented soul. They call me a genius, but genius is not a gift—it is a burden, a fire that never lets you rest. 

I worked like a madman, lived like a poor man, and fought like a warrior. I was not made for comfort. I was made for stone and struggle.

Let me tell you my story.

Born Among Stone and Dust

I was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a small town in Tuscany. But I do not remember Caprese. When I was still a baby, my family moved to Settignano, near Florence. 

My father, Ludovico di Leonardo Buonarroti, was a nobleman with little money. My mother, Francesca di Neri, was frail and sickly.

She could not care for me, so I was sent to live with a stonecutter’s family. I grew up surrounded by chisels, hammers, and marble dust. It is no surprise, then, that I became a sculptor. Stone was my cradle; carving was in my blood.

But childhood did not last long. When I was just six years old, my mother died. I barely remember her face. My father was cold and distant, and I learned early on that the only thing I could rely on were my own hands.

My father wanted me to be a merchant or a bureaucrat—something respectable. But I was drawn to lines, shapes, and figures. I spent hours sketching, drawing, dreaming. My father beat me for it. He said I was wasting my future.

At 13, I defied him. I became an apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the finest painters in Florence. It was here that I learned the art of fresco, but I was never satisfied. Painting was not enough. I wanted to carve, to bring stone to life.

That was when I found my way to the Medici Gardens, where the great sculptures of ancient Rome stood. I had never seen anything more beautiful. It was there that I met Bertoldo di Giovanni, a sculptor who had once studied under Donatello himself. 

He saw something in me—a fire, a hunger—and introduced me to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico, the ruler of Florence.

The Medici Court

Lorenzo took me into his court. I studied under the greatest minds of the time. Philosophers, poets, artists—they all gathered there. I dined with princes and debated with scholars.

But not everyone welcomed me. I was young, arrogant, and talented—a dangerous combination. The older students despised me.

And then came Pietro Torrigiani.

He was a brute, bigger and stronger than me, and he hated me. One night, in a fit of jealousy, he struck me—so hard he shattered my nose.

Blood poured down my face. I fell to the ground, gasping, but I never forgot the humiliation, the pain, the rage. My nose never healed properly. For the rest of my life, my face bore the mark of that night.

The Pietà

In 1492, Lorenzo de’ Medici died. Everything changed. The new ruler, Piero de’ Medici, had no interest in art. Then came Savonarola, the fanatical monk who preached against luxury, beauty, and the Medici. Florence turned against the very things I loved.

I traveled to Bologna, where I studied anatomy, dissecting bodies in secret. I wanted to understand the human form like no one ever had. I studied muscles, bones, the way flesh stretched over them. I did not just carve marble—I carved life.

Then, in 1496, I arrived in Rome. I was just 21 years old, hungry, desperate to prove myself.

They gave me a block of Carrara marble, I carved Mary cradling the lifeless body of Christ—not as a grieving mother, but as a woman of eternal sorrow and grace.

When it was unveiled, no one believed a young, unknown sculptor had made it. I was furious. I would not be ignored.

So, one night, I carved my name across Mary’s sash:

“MICHAEL ANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTINUS FACIEBAT.”

(Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this.)

It was the only work I ever signed. I regretted it immediately. A true artist does not need to sign his work. His work speaks for itself.

The David

Florence called me home. They had driven out the Medici and wanted a symbol of their new Republic. They gave me a ruined block of marble, abandoned for 40 years. Others had tried to carve it. All had failed.

When I first saw the block, I felt its potential. Where others saw ruin, I saw him waiting inside—David, the young hero who faced the giant when others cowered. A perfect symbol for Florence, standing defiant against greater powers.

For three years, I worked in secret. My studio became my prison, my sanctuary. I slept little, ate less. I would work through the night, a single candle my only light, the sound of my chisel striking stone echoing in the darkness. I carved away everything that was not David.

This was no simple statue. I did not carve the triumphant boy standing over Goliath’s severed head. No—I captured him in that moment of decision, that terrible, beautiful instant before action. His eyes fixed on his enemy, his body tense, his hand gripping the stone. Every vein, every muscle, every sinew ready for what must come.

The marble seemed to breathe beneath my hands. The stone was no longer stone but flesh—living, thinking, feeling. With each strike of my chisel, I liberated what had always been there, waiting.

When he was unveiled in 1504, Florence gasped. David was perfection. Standing over fourteen feet tall, he towered over the crowd, a colossus of marble made flesh. They moved him to the Piazza della Signoria, at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio—a guardian, a warning to all who would threaten Florence’s liberty.

I heard the whispers: “How did he carve such life from stone?” “It is not possible that a man made this.” But I knew the truth. I had not created David. I had merely found him in the marble, waiting to be freed.

The Sistine Chapel: My Greatest Torment

The warrior Pope, Julius II, summoned me to Rome. He wanted a grand tomb, a monument to his greatness. I designed it—40 statues, colossal in scale.

Then he changed his mind.

“Paint my chapel ceiling instead,” he commanded.

I was furious. I was a sculptor! Not a painter! But no one refused Julius II.

For four years, I lay on my back, paint dripping into my eyes, my arms cramping. I fought with my assistants, with the Pope, with myself. But I finished it.

When the scaffold came down, Rome looked up and saw creation itself.

Adam reaching for the hand of God.

The Prophets, the Sibyls, the Flood, the ancestors of Christ.

They called it divine. I saw only my mistakes.

The Sistine Chapel: My Greatest Torment

Victoria Colonna: The Woman Who Understood My Soul

In my old age, when my body was failing, but my mind remained aflame, I met Victoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara. She was no ordinary aristocrat—she was a poet of rare talent, a woman of profound faith, and the first person who truly understood the tempest in my soul. I was nearly sixty when our paths crossed, and she was a widow devoted to spiritual contemplation. We exchanged letters, poems, and drawings. I sketched Christ on the cross for her, and she wrote sonnets that pierced my heart with their clarity.

Do not misunderstand me—she was a friend, nothing more. I never married, never fathered children. My sculptures were my legacy, my only offspring. Marriage was for men who needed comfort; I needed only marble and solitude. But Victoria… she was different. Unlike the patrons who saw only my hands, Victoria saw my spirit. We never touched—our connection transcended the physical—yet she brought a warmth to my winter years that I had never known.

When death claimed her in 1547, I stood by her bedside, kissed her hand, and later wrote: “Death stole my great friend, the only mirror in which I saw myself.” With her gone, I retreated further into solitude and my conversations with stone and God.

My Final Years: A Sculptor to the End

I spent my last decades in Rome, but do not imagine a life of luxury. By then, I was famous beyond measure, yet I lived as I always had—simply, almost like a monk. My home was in Quartiere dei Corvi, a poor, grimy neighborhood, nothing like the grand palaces of the popes and cardinals who sought my work.

My house was small, cold, and sparsely furnished. There were no riches, no decorations, nothing to suggest that inside lived the greatest artist of the time. 

Only sketches, unfinished sculptures, and letters stacked on rough wooden tables. My clothes? Old, tattered, covered in marble dust. Servants complained that I rarely changed them. I ate little, slept less, and worked always.

And yet, in those final years, something changed.

I had spent my life creating monuments of strength, grandeur, and divine perfection. But age humbles a man. My hands, once firm, began to tremble. My body, once tireless, ached. The Michelangelo who had carved David was gone.

That was when I turned to the Pietà Bandini.

The Pietà Bandini: The Sculpture I Could Not Finish

I had sculpted a Pietà before, long ago, in my youth—the perfect, smooth, divine Pietà of St. Peter’s. But this Pietà… this one was different.

I no longer sought perfection. I sought the truth.

I began carving Christ’s lifeless body, draped across the arms of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Nicodemus. But it was not just Nicodemus I sculpted—it was myself.

I carved my own face into the hooded figure, not as an artist, but as an old man, weary, burdened by time. I had spent my life trying to bring stone to life, yet now I felt as lifeless as the marble I carved.

For years, I worked on it, but something tormented me. The stone fought me. Flaws appeared, cracks spread. I grew frustrated, desperate. One night, in a fit of rage, I took a hammer and struck it—shattering Christ’s arm and leg.

But I could not destroy it completely. The fire in me had dimmed, but it had not died. I abandoned the piece, leaving it to my assistant, Tiberio Calcagni, who tried to restore what I had broken. 

But the truth is, that Pietà was never meant to be finished.

It was a reflection of me—a man at the end of his journey, struggling with doubt, with faith, with time itself.

The Last Days

I knew my end was near. My body weakened, but my mind remained sharp. I wrote letters, sketched obsessively, dictated poems filled with sorrow and longing for God.

On the night of February 18, 1564, I felt the weight of years pressing down. No grand farewell, no dramatic scene—just a man, lying in his poor home, slipping away.

The Final Journey Home

Even in death, I could not escape controversy. I died in Rome, but my heart had always belonged to Florence. My nephew, Leonardo, knew this better than anyone.

But Rome would not easily surrender what it claimed as its own. Pope Pius IV wanted to entomb me in St. Peter’s, near my work, among the great men of Rome. Leonardo, stubborn like his uncle, refused. In the dead of night, he had my body wrapped in merchant cloth, loaded onto a simple cart as if I were nothing more than a parcel of goods or sacks of grain.

Like thieves, they smuggled me out of Rome— I would have laughed at the absurdity. The man who had moved mountains, the great Michelangelo, smuggled like forbidden wine.

When at last they reached Florence, the city erupted with grief and pride upon learning their son had returned. 

They gave me what Rome had denied—a funeral worthy of my name. Three weeks after my death, the Florentines gathered at the Church of San Lorenzo, and then at Santa Croce, to honor the man they had always claimed as their own.

They buried me in Florence, in the land that had shaped me.

And so, I left this world as I had lived in it, I am Michelangelo and this is my story.