How Did Michelangelo Go from Artist to Architect? | Historical Bio Brief

Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni, better known simply as Michelangelo, is considered by many to be the greatest fresco artist and sculptor of the Renaissance era. But as incredible and beautiful as his artistic creations are, Michelangelo was much more than an artist only. Truly the Renaissance man, he was a poet, an architect, and an engineer as well. His foremost biographer, William Wallace, tells us more about Michelangelo, the architect and engineer, careers he came to later in life. Was it unusual for artists to be architects as well, or at that time was everybody sort of doing everything? The Renaissance man and the Renaissance, so to speak. No, it actually was not unusual. There was not yet an architectural profession, really, and architects were trained as artists. Artists were the ones who knew how to draw, how to draft, how to use paper and pencil, basically, and to build models. So the architects really came out of being artists. So Michelangelo came out of a usual profession, but it was unusual to become an architect at age 40, which is what Michelangelo did, because up until age 40 he was carving sculpture and painting the Sistine Ceiling, and he had really no training in architecture at all. And suddenly he takes up architecture at age 40, like he took up poetry at age 50, and he takes up these things and becomes one of the most important architects of all time. And in fact, I would say, probably Michelangelo's architecture was more influential on later subsequent centuries than any of his painting and sculpture. People who try to imitate Michelangelo's sculpture are pretty bad artists. Or brave. Or very brave, but oftentimes failed. But you would have to have some sort of engineering understanding or something, right? Because, I mean, he was redesigning all the elements of it, not just the pretty parts. Well, this is another part of the facet of Michelangelo that I've spent a lot of time sort of excavating and repurposing. Michelangelo the engineer, we think of Leonardo da Vinci, if you ask who's the greatest engineer of the Renaissance, everybody would say Leonardo da Vinci. We have 6,000 pages of Leonardo's drawings and all kinds of brilliant engineering ideas, but Leonardo didn't actually carry out any of those engineering ideas. Michelangelo just did it. He didn't talk about it, he didn't draw it, he just did it. And he accomplished enormously complicated and impressive engineering feats all through his life. So he had an engineering skill and knowledge that was of a depth beyond anybody else of his time. And it started with the fact that he was a sculptor. He was bringing marble blocks from the Carrara quarries, 90 miles from Carrara to Florence, and these were blocks that are eight tons, larger than anything that had been moved since Roman times a thousand years before. So he had to rethink how the Romans had done this, and how they had transported these materials, how they lifted eight tons and moved them 90 miles. So that was the beginning of his engineering knowledge, which helps, of course, in building a building. Well you talk about, too, using the donkeys to haul these things in this kind of system that he arranged around with ramps and so forth to get the donkeys to haul that up there. This was a brilliant innovation in St. Peter's. We don't actually know, unless you climb the dome in St. Peter's, because you climb the dome and come down one of these helical ramps. There are four of them in the corners of the dome, and these are enclosed ramps, circular helical ramps that go up. And these were designed by Michelangelo so that he could carry the materials, the building materials, sand, bricks, water, and the stone up 200 or 250 feet, and the donkeys were carrying these up these ramps. And of course, if the donkeys knew they were 250 feet up in the air, they would have frozen, and they wouldn't have moved. But inside these helical ramps, they were very comfortable, and they were very easy to carry these heavy, heavy weights up. So this is one of these brilliant innovations that Michelangelo came up with. Well, and of all the parts of St. Peter's that people would picture, I think, when they first picture St. Peter's, in their mind at least, is the dome. The dome. Which was a significant contribution. You point out in the book that not only was that the crowning contribution, so to speak, at St. Peter's, but that it kind of changed the landscape of Rome from a city of bell towers to a city of domes. It's a very nice way to put it. Yes, it's exactly right. When we look over the landscape of Rome, it is the dome of St. Peter's that dominates our whole vision of the city. And it's the dome that gets imitated over and over again for the next two or three hundred years. St. Paul's in London, dome after dome after dome, modeled on St. Peter's. The sad thing is, of course, Paul, is that Michelangelo never saw that dome completed. And this is the great, I think, maybe something of the tragedy of Michelangelo's late life. I mean, he lived to 89 years, but not quite long enough to see that dome completed. And this is, I think, not really a tragedy because it's a miracle, really, that he knew what that dome was going to be. And not to be able to live long enough to see your greatest masterpiece completed is really kind of a sad thing.