Works by Michelangelo

Michelangelo did not count himself a painter, though he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Nearly all the works below are drawings, among them red chalk studies of nude figures for that ceiling.

As a boy in Florence he neglected his grammar lessons to copy paintings in the city's churches, Giotto's and Masaccio's frescoes among them. In 1488, at 13, he went to work for Domenico Ghirlandaio, a fresco painter with the biggest studio in town. The Torment of Saint Anthony, dated 1487, lifts the white-bearded saint above a river valley in a knot of demons with scales, spines and bat wings, one swinging a club while others tug at his head and robe.

Pope Julius II wanted the Twelve Apostles on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo talked him into nine scenes from Genesis framed by prophets and sibyls instead, and painted them between 1508 and 1512. He drew some figures first in red chalk. On a sheet of studies for the Libyan Sibyl the body turns its back to us with both arms raised, and around it he drew the head, a hand and the big toe again, larger. In the study for the nude youth over the prophet Daniel, one of the twenty ignudi beside the smaller scenes, the chest and raised thigh are fully modelled while the head is only a faint outline.

In 1532 he met the young Roman nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri and made him drawings, a Tityus among them. In The Punishment of Tityus Tityus lies on his back across a rock while the bird stands on his chest, wings spread over the top of the sheet. From 1534 he lived in Rome, where the poet Vittoria Colonna was a close friend until her death in 1547. In the Pietà he drew for her, Mary sits with both arms flung up and her eyes on the sky, while two small angels hold up the arms of the dead Christ propped between her knees. In 1559 Catherine de Medici asked him for a monument to her late husband, Henry II of France, on horseback; the design is a quick outline of a horse, one foreleg raised, on a tall base of niches and pilasters. It was never made: Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564, aged 88, and the assistant meant to take it over died as well.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Kimbell Art Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Rijksmuseum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Royal Collection, Cleveland Museum of Art.