6th March: Birth of Michelangelo

The artist Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475. Here are 10 things you may not know about him.

1. Michelangelo's full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.
2. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty.
3. His mother died when he was six, and he was sent to live with a stonecutter and his wife.
4. When Michelangelo was fourteen, his father persuaded Domenico Ghirlandaio, the artist with the largest workshop in Florence, to take Michelangelo on as an apprentice.
5. The Madonna of the Steps is Michelangelo's earliest known work.
6. As a young man, Michelangelo taunted a fellow student, and that student hit him, breaking his nose, which disfigured him for life.
7. He suffered from depression from time to time. During one of his bouts of depression he wrote: "I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow/my repose are these discomforts."
8. As well as painting and sculpture, Michelangelo wrote poetry. He wrote over three hundred sonnets and madrigals. The content of them has led historians to believe that he may have been gay as he wrote erotic love sonnets to young men, in particular, Tommaso dei Cavalieri. When Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published the poems in 1623, he changed them so that they appeared to have been written to a woman. They were restored to their original form by John Addington Symonds in 1893. However, Michelangelo also wrote poetry for a woman, the widow Vittoria Colonna, who wrote sonnets back to him.
9. Michelangelo's sculptures astounded people in his day by how anatomically accurate they were. This was because Michelangelo had been granted special permission from the Catholic Church to study cadavers in order to learn about anatomy.
10. Most of his work was well received, but not all of it. When the Last Judgement on the wall of the Cistine Chapel was first unveiled, there was an outcry because figures in it were naked. There were even calls for the work to be destroyed because nudity was inappropriate for such a holy place.