Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance [1]. Born in the Republic of Florence, he received his education at the University of Florence and was subsequently active in Rome from his thirties onwards [1][10]. His work drew inspiration from classical antiquity and exerted a lasting influence on Western art, with contemporaries and later critics alike regarding him as the defining creative figure of his era [1][8].
During his lifetime, Michelangelo was frequently referred to as Il Divino, or "the divine one," a testament to the sense of awe — described by contemporaries as terribilità — that his works inspired in viewers [11]. Giorgio Vasari, one of three biographers who published accounts of the artist while he was still alive, declared his work "supreme in not one art alone but in all three," meaning sculpture, painting, and architecture [9]. He was the first Western artist to have his biography published during his own lifetime, and the volume of surviving correspondence and sketches makes him among the best-documented artists of the sixteenth century [8][9].
Michelangelo's expressive physicality proved enormously influential after his death, as subsequent artists' attempts to replicate his style contributed to the emergence of Mannerism, a movement bridging the High Renaissance and the Baroque [11].
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