Michelangelo

Michelangelo called himself a sculptor even while painting the Sistine ceiling, and resented the commission. He worked on it from 1508 to 1512, standing on scaffolding of his own design, painting over three hundred figures across a surface he had not wanted to touch.

The bodies are the argument. Everything he made, in marble or paint, is built from anatomy pushed past what anatomy allows: torsos twisted, muscles exaggerated, limbs arranged to carry emotional weight. He dissected corpses as a teenager to learn it.

The David was cut from a block other sculptors had abandoned as ruined. The Last Judgment, painted on the Sistine altar wall twenty five years after the ceiling, caused a scandal over its nudity and was partly painted over after his death. He also wrote poetry, designed the dome of St Peter’s, and complained bitterly in letters throughout.