On March 6, 1475, in a tiny Italian village called Caprese, a baby named Michelangelo Buonarroti was born. His father didn't want him to be an artist - back then, artists were treated more like construction workers than geniuses. But Michelangelo couldn't stop drawing, and at thirteen he became an apprentice in a famous Florence workshop. By seventeen he was carving marble for the most powerful family in Italy, the Medicis, who treated him like a son.
When he was just 24, Michelangelo carved the Pietà, a marble statue of Mary holding Jesus, so smooth and lifelike that visitors refused to believe one young man had made it. Five years later he started the David, a 17-foot giant chiseled from a single chunk of marble other sculptors had given up on. Then in 1508, Pope Julius II ordered him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo hated the job and considered himself a sculptor, not a painter. For four years he stood on tall wooden scaffolding, neck cranked back, paint dripping into his eyes, covering 5,000 square feet with hundreds of figures.
When the ceiling was unveiled, the whole world gasped. Michelangelo lived to be 88, which was ancient back then, and kept working on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome until just days before he died. More than 500 years later, millions of visitors still tilt their heads back in the Sistine Chapel and stare at the swirling sky he painted, made by a stubborn, paint-spattered kid from a tiny Italian village.
