The Picture of Michelangelo Buonarotti

Michelangelo is looking straight in front of him with a strong, stern gaze, facing away from the people watching him. He is presented as a ruler, a king having his visage commemorated on a coin for all his subjects to see. Artists in Michelangelo’s time could enjoy a great amount of prestige and be regarded as princes of the arts, immortalized in paintings, monuments and medals made in their honor. Although Michelangelo was one of the most celebrated artists at the time, very few portraits of him were made. This is one of the few depictions of him that were made during his lifetime. Why would such a celebrity not be portrayed in the way that his colleagues were?

When Michelangelo was young, he lived in Florence with the ruling Medici family who housed many promising young artists. One day he got into a fight with a young sculptor by the name of Torrigiano, who broke Michelangelo’s nose so badly that he had to live with a flattened and scarred face for the rest of his life. To another artist, Cellini, the culprit recounted the events of that day:

It was Buonarotti’s habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and, clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like a biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this he will carry with him to the grave. Asciano Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo (trans. Alice Sedgewick Wohl, 1974), 108, 146 n129.

Whether this was the sole reason for him being ‘painting-shy’ or not, only Michelangelo himself knew. But his encounter with Torrigiano certainly had a great effect on him and he refused to be portrayed by anyone other than his close friends. The portrait on the medal we see here was made by one of these close friends of his, an artist named Leone Leoni. Let’s zoom in on Michelangelo’s shoulder and see what we can discover about this figure.