Michelangelo, was the renowned and well-known Italian artist. One of the titans of the Renaissance, he was a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Born in Caprese, Tuscany, he grew up in Florence and was apprenticed in 1488 to the painter Domenico Chirlandaio. Soon afterward he attended a school under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici. In 1496 he went to Rome, where he carved the famous marble "Pieta" in St. Peter's a sculpture which in the pure smoothness of its surface textures and in the serene balance of its pyramidal design, typifies the High Renaissance concept of art. This art of harmony and monumentality was born out of a very special union of the real and the ideal that came to a brief moment of equipoise during the end of the 15th century and first quarter of the 16th century. Artistically this period was not unlike the golden age in Greece.

In 1501 Michelangelo returned to Florence and over the next few years executed a number of works. The circular painting known as the "Doni Tondo", with its sculptural figures of the Holy Family, dates from this period. During this stay in Florence, Michelangelo also received a commission to create a huge fresco for the Council Hall of the new Florence republic. This work, "The Battle of Cascina" was not completed, but a full-sized drawing, now lost, exercised tremendous influence on the artists of the era.

The huge marble statue, "David", now in the Accademia in Florence, is another work executed during this sojourn in Florence. Over 14 ft. high, it is a powerful giant who in his youthfulness symbolizes the freshness and vigor of Michelangelo's early vision. The anatomy is detailed the veins bulge through the flesh of the reposing hand, the rib cage is modeled under the muscular chest. Yet the blocklike form of the marble is retained and this abstract discipline adds to the force of the sculptural conception.

A similar harmonious relation of part to part and part to the whole-measured, ordered, clearly and logically conceived in simple geometries also characterizes Michelangelo's decorations for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome. Begun for Pope Julius II in 1508, and finished in 1512, the Old testament histories unfold, scene after scene, like the separate frames of a film, on the huge barrel-vaulted ceiling. Because of he actual physical discomfort of the artist, who often panted in a supine position, the mammoth project is all the more startling for its ordered clarity, a total design of linked rectangles and triangles, in which sibyls, prophets, slaves and ancestors of Christ flank the story of the creation of the world and of man, the temptation and fall, the sacrifice of Noah and the Flood.

Of Michelangelo's numerous architectural works the Mideci Chapel, the Laurentian Library off the cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, the facades and court of the palace group on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and others the most notable is the dome of St. Peter's. On becoming chief architect of the church in 1546, he restored Bramante's plan for a body shaped like a Greek cross and crowned by a large dome at the transept. The plan of the church itself was later altered, but the dome was completed on his design, with some modifications, after his death. It is one his masterpieces.