Early Life

Early Life

1475–88

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany. (Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo.) For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence, but the bank failed, and his father, Ludovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni, briefly took a government post in Caprese, where Michelangelo was born. At the time of Michelangelo’s birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelo’s mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa; this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it. Several months after Michelangelo’s birth, the family returned to Florence, where Michelangelo was raised. At later times, during his mother’s prolonged illness and after her death in 1481, when he was just six years old, Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, who was a stonecutter, in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. It was here where Michelangelo gained his love for marble, as we see Giorgio Vasari quoting Michelangelo:

“If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.”