Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, in the Republic of Florence, in present-day Tuscany. As a boy in Florence he received grammar instruction from the humanist Francesco da Urbino, though he showed little interest in formal schooling and was drawn instead to copying paintings in local churches. In 1488, at thirteen, he was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the city's leading workshops, where he learned fresco and panel technique; he left within about a year. Lorenzo de' Medici then brought him into the Medici household to study classical sculpture in the Medici gardens under Bertoldo di Giovanni and, from around 1490 to 1492, to attend the Medici's Humanist Academy, where he encountered the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano.

His career unfolded across Florence and Rome under a succession of powerful patrons. He carved the marble David between 1501 and 1504 for the city of Florence, and from 1508 to 1512 painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II. He returned to the chapel between 1536 and 1541 to paint The Last Judgment for Pope Paul III. From 1547 until his death he served as chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica, a role in which, by his own and later accounts, he was largely self-taught, having taken up architecture seriously only in his forties.

Michelangelo died in Rome on 18 February 1564, at his home near Macel de' Corvi, at the age of 88. His nephew Leonardo secretly returned his body to Florence within weeks, against the pope's wish to bury him at St. Peter's, and he was laid to rest at the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb remains today.

Michelangelo's standing has been essentially unchanged since his own lifetime: biographers describe him as one of the first Western artists to be celebrated as a genius while he was still living, with two biographies, including Vasari's, published before his death. Modern museum programming, from the Metropolitan Museum's 2017 drawings exhibition to the Getty's and the Cleveland Museum of Art's Michelangelo: Mind of the Master shows and Casa Buonarroti's own recurring exhibitions on the Sistine ceiling's afterlife, treats him less as a historical subject to be reassessed than as a fixed reference point against which later art is measured.

Michelangelo's market is defined by extreme scarcity rather than by turnover. Christie's has noted that almost all of his known drawings are already in public collections, with only about ten sheets remaining in private hands, so most of his market activity happens once a generation, when one of those sheets surfaces. The current auction record is USD 27,200,000, paid at Christie's New York on 5 February 2026 for a newly identified study for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Study for a foot of the Libyan Sibyl, which carries a related study of a bent knee on its verso. That sale surpassed the previous record of about USD 24.3 million (EUR 23 million), set at Christie's Paris on 18 May 2022 for Nude Man (after Masaccio) and Two Figures Behind Him. Both results place Michelangelo among the small group of artists, of any period, whose auction ceiling for a single sheet of paper runs into the tens of millions of dollars.

There is effectively no active market for Michelangelo in the way collectors think about living or twentieth-century artists: no gallery or estate represents him, and there is no single published catalogue raisonne to check a work against. What exists instead is an institutional record, held chiefly by Casa Buonarroti in Florence and the Vatican Museums, and a very short list of drawings still outside public collections. Because so few sheets are known, a newly surfaced or newly reattributed work can move the entire market's benchmark overnight, as the 2022 and 2026 sales both did. Anyone evaluating a claimed Michelangelo should expect authentication to rest on provenance history, period inscriptions, and specialist connoisseurship rather than on a raisonne entry.