Michelangelo had his nose broken as a teenager by a fellow student called Pietro Torrigiano. They were both copying frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel when Torrigiano, tired of Michelangelo's taunting, punched him in the face. The nose stayed crooked for the rest of his life. Torrigiano was proud of it.

He was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio at thirteen, the standard arrangement for a Florentine boy showing artistic ability. Ghirlandaio ran the largest workshop in the city and was a master of fresco technique. Michelangelo left after one year, claiming there was nothing more to learn. He moved to the sculpture garden of Lorenzo de' Medici, where he studied ancient Roman fragments and attracted the patronage of the Medici family. He was sixteen.

The Pieta was finished when he was twenty-four. David when he was twenty-nine. Both before the age of thirty. He carved David from a block of marble that two previous sculptors had already attempted and abandoned: a narrow, shallow piece that dictated the figure's proportions and made the engineering problem as interesting as the artistic one.

Pope Julius II commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508. Michelangelo did not want the job. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and suspected the commission was a political manoeuvre by rivals to set him up for public failure. He fired his assistants, built his own scaffolding, and painted the entire 65-foot ceiling himself over four years. The image of him lying on his back is a myth; he stood, bending backwards, paint dripping into his eyes.

He outlived both Leonardo and Raphael by more than forty years. His last significant work was the redesign of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. He took no fee.