04/09/2026
Michelangelo Was Just a Teenager When He Created These
Before Michelangelo turned 18, he had already entered the world of Lorenzo de’ Medici, had his nose permanently broken in a fight with another sculptor, studied dead bodies to understand anatomy, and created works that most artists would have been proud to make at the end of a career.
He was barely thirteen when he entered the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio in Florence. His father was not enthusiastic about the idea of his son becoming an artist, because painting and sculpture were still considered manual trades. Michelangelo, however, was completely obsessed with it.
Very quickly, people began noticing that this boy was different.
His talent brought him into the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Lorenzo the Magnificent,” one of the most powerful men in Florence. Michelangelo suddenly found himself surrounded by ancient sculpture, philosophers, poets and artists at the very centre of Renaissance Florence.
And he was still only about fifteen.
Around that age he carved the Madonna of the Stairs, one of the earliest surviving sculptures we can confidently connect to him.
Then, at about sixteen or seventeen, he carved the Battle of the Centaurs.
This one mattered enormously to Michelangelo. He kept it for the rest of his life.
Imagine that. After the Pietà, David, Moses and the Sistine Chapel, the old Michelangelo still kept a piece of marble he had carved when he was a teenager.
Those years were not peaceful either.
Another young sculptor in the Medici circle, Pietro Torrigiano, became furious with Michelangelo during an argument and punched him so violently that he broke his nose.
Michelangelo carried that broken nose for the rest of his life. Look at later portraits of him and you can still see it.
Then came something even more unusual.
At Santo Spirito in Florence, the teenage Michelangelo was allowed to study human corpses.
For him, this was priceless.
He did not want to guess what happened beneath the skin. He wanted to know where the muscles attached, how the ribs moved, how shoulders turned and how a human body really worked.
In gratitude, he carved a wooden crucifix for Santo Spirito when he was around seventeen.
So before Michelangelo was even an adult, his life already contained almost everything that would define him later: the Medici, marble, rivalry, violence, anatomy and an almost obsessive need to understand the human body.