Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti trained briefly in Domenico Ghirlandaio's Florentine workshop and studied ancient sculpture in the household of Lorenzo de' Medici. He thought of himself first as a sculptor, and carved the Pietà and David before he was thirty. He painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, returned decades later for The Last Judgment on its altar wall, and at 71 became architect of St Peter's. He was the first Western artist whose biography was published in his lifetime.