Michelangelo

He was humorless, lonely, quarrelsome, perfectionistic and pious, a sculptor, painter, and poet.  As an infant, he was nursed by a stone-cutter’s wife. He often said it was from them that he got his love of sculpture. It certainly didn’t come from his father, a respectable magistrate who beat his son when he asked to become an artists apprentice. But Michelangelo persevered and his early sculptures caught the attention of Florence’s great ruler, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who invited the boy to be educated with his own sons. Over the course of his tumultuous career that lasted more than sixty years, Michelangelo would serve—and argue with—four different popes, creating masterpieces in all three of the noble arts: sculpture, painting, and architecture. And in an age of remarkable artists, he was possibly the greatest of them all.