1521. Commences Medicean Tombs in San Lorenzo.
1529. Fortifies Florence against Charles V.
1535-41. Paints Last Judgment.
1547. Begins building Cupola of St. Peter's.
1564. Dies in Rome.
THE LIFE OF MICHELANGELO
In the quaintly written diary of Messer Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, a well-to-do Florentine citizen, the following entry, dated March 6th, 1475, may still be found: "To-day there was born unto me a male child, whom I have named Michelagnolo.[[1]] He saw the light at Caprese, whereof I am Podestà , on Monday morning, 6th March, between four and five o'clock, and on the 8th of the same month he was baptized in the church of San Giovanni." Messer Lodovico had been appointed Podestà , or Governor, of Chiusi and Caprese in the Casentino by Lorenzo de Medici only a few months before penning this memorandum, so that, by a strange caprice of fate, it was here, in the little town overshadowed by the rugged Sasso della Verna, hallowed by the ecstatic visions of St. Francis of Assisi, and not in Florence, in the Athens of the Italian Renaissance, where resurrected Paganism ran riot and triumphed, that the longest and most glorious career in the history of art and of human endeavour began.
[[1]] This is the archaic form of angelo. The name is also sometimes spelt Michelangiolo, but I have thought it advisable to adopt the modern and more generally accepted Michelangelo.
Vasari and Condivi, Michelangelo's pupils and enthusiastic biographers, maintain that the Buonarroti family was closely related to the great house of the Counts of Canossa, a conviction fully shared, curiously enough, by the artist himself, who rather prided himself on his aristocratic connection. But recent genealogical researches have proved beyond all doubt that, although of gentle birth (both his father and his mother, Madonna Francesca di Miniato Del Sera, coming of ancient Florentine stock), Michelangelo could not in reality lay claim to even distant ties of kinship with the Canossa family.