Was born in the house of the podesta of Caprese, a small village located between two mountains in the high valley of the Tiber on 6 March 1475. His father was Ludovico, a modest state officer and a man of little capacity. Michelangelo`s ambition was to improve the luck of the Buonarrotti Simoni family of old Florentine ancestry that at one time had belonged to the nobility but since 1506 had started to buy land and deposit savings for that objective. His mother Francesca died when he was only 6 years old and this event probably influenced his melancholy nature and his way of representing the Virgin without that feminine sweetness which he himself had lacked in his youth. He was a bourgeois from the Florence of the palaces and towers, of the hills with their small cypress and olive trees; the elegant Florence, busy and proud, a prey to all types of fanaticisms, and of all the religious and social hysterias where freedom and tyranny coexisted, where Leonardo`s spiritual freedom had no outlet and where Buonarrotti finished in the mysticism of Scottish puritanism, where Savonarola made the monks dance round the bonfire while he burnt works of art which he considered sacrilegious and where three years later, he himself would end up being burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. Michelangelo`s first impulse was to study literature but nevertheless, and against all the desires of his family who considered it a lowly profession, he dedicated himself to art. When he was 13 years old he entered the workshop of Ghirlandaio as an apprentice and remained there for 3 years. Ghirlandaio was highly impressed with his talent and recommended him to Lorenzo the Magnificent. A year later found him frequenting the gardens of San Marcos of Lorenze with its magnificent antique statues, surrounded by family and intellectuals. There he got in contact with Pico della Mirandola and for a time was a student of the sculptor Bertoldo, a disciple of Donatello.
