Who was Michelangelo's teacher?
Michelangelo and the Medici
Michelangelo's father sent him to study grammar with the Renaissance humanist Francesco da Urbino in Florence as a young boy.[1] The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters.[1] At thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.[2] When Michelangelo was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time.[3] When in 1489 Lorenzo de' Medici ("Lorenzo il Magnifico), de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.[3] Lorenzo had taken notice of Michelangelo’s unusual talent and, wishing to encourage him, proposed for Michelangelo to move into the palace and live there as his son to be educated along with the Medici children. Lorenzo even offered Michelangelo’s father Lodovico a respectable position in the palace. Michelangelo was thrown into the midst of the Medici circle where he was involved with poetry, science, philosophy, and art.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo was abstemious in his personal life, and once told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man."[61] Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure"[61] and that he "often slept in his clothes and... boots."[61] His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him."[62] He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico, a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men."[63]