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In 1505, Pope Julius II called a much-admired Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo to Rome to create a huge, freestanding tomb with approximately 40 over-life-size marble statues, all to be made within five years. When the pope saw Michelangelo's design, he was so delighted that he dispatched the artist immediately to the stupendous marble quarries of Carrara, not far from the Italian coast in Tuscany, to find suitable stone.

While Michelangelo was considering the landscape, he was seized with the idea of carving a colossus out of a mountain that would be visible to seafarers from afar (one presumes comparable to the great Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). Although 94 wagonloads of marble were quarried and shipped back to Rome, the papal tomb was never completed according to the original plan. Neither was a gigantic figure ever carved from the mountain face by the shores of Tuscany.

Michelangelo himself became the true Colossus of Tuscany. Sculptor, painter, poet, architect, and sincere Christian—he embodied the grand tensions, complexities, uncertainties, and achievements of his era. His name is synonymous with the glory of the Renaissance.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, in the tiny town of Caprese in the Apennine Mountains. He was the second of five sons of Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni, then 167th Florentine Podestà (commissioner) of that town. Just months after the birth of Michelangelo (who was named after an archangel), the family returned relatively impoverished to the Santa Croce district of Florence, where for centuries they had claimed residence and ancient nobility. Soon Michelangelo was sent to a wet nurse, a daughter and wife of a stonemason. In jest he always claimed to have imbibed with her milk the desire and propensity for shaping stone.

Michelangelo's mother died when he was six years old, and four years later his father remarried. His father and stepmother believed that his desire to become an artist (which he showed at an early age) was beneath the dignity of the family, since artists at that time were considered craftsmen and therefore working class. Ludovico eventually relented, however, and placed Michelangelo in the Florentine studio of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio as an apprentice. But the teenage Michelangelo was not entirely happy in this position and came to prefer sculpture over painting. Through his friendship with another artist, he found his way to the artistic community working in the Medici Gardens near the convent of San Marco.

Here he shared in the intimate family circle of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent (1449-1492), a remarkable statesman and patron of the arts who soon became a mentor to the young artist. Michelangelo was able to mingle with some of the sharpest minds and most gifted humanists of the period and to study many examples of classical art, as well the radical new styles of early Renaissance artists such as the painter Masaccio and the sculptor Donatello. The fertile creative atmosphere of the Medici community left Michelangelo free to develop his own personal style, and his great talents won him far-reaching admiration.

This period of Michelangelo's life was as spiritually formative as it was artistically formative, due to the influence of the fervent Dominican friar and social reformer, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). As prior of the convent of San Marco, Savonarola preached against the Medici's abuse of power as well as the indulgent and immoral lifestyle of civil leaders and clergy alike, including the pope.

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