Michelangelo

This biography captures Michelangelo's extraordinary journey from stonecutter's son to the most celebrated artist of the Renaissance. Strutt traces the young Michelangelo's defiance of his father's bourgeois aspirations, his apprenticeship under Lorenzo de' Medici, and the fierce dedication that drove him to sculpt his masterworks before turning thirty. The narrative illuminates how a boy from Settignano, raised among stonemasons, would come to divide the Western artistic imagination with only one other name: Leonardo. What emerges is a portrait of genius as struggle, Michelangelo's ferocious temper, his tortured perfectionism, his physical suffering endured for art. Strutt documents the creation of the Pietà and David, the divine torment of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the architectural ambitions that would consume his final decades. This early twentieth-century account offers a valuable window into how Michelangelo was understood before modern art history, revealing both the awe he inspired and the human cost of his divinity.