Michelangelo Di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (placeholder)

greatest painter and sculptor

what magnificent hands. i would like to ask him what he thought of god..what he thought of this…what he thought of trees and love and good french brie…we’d talk and walk and make fun of artists…jus’ cuz

People make a big deal about Leonardo da Vinci, including writing books on How to Think Like da Vinci and workbooks training the da Vinci way of thinking, but frankly Leonardo is a little too perfect. Michelangelo is more my style. Irving Stone wrote a fascinating book about Michelangelo called The Agony and the Ecstasy. I couldn’t put it down. Literally.

And see, even though he was a genius, he was a bit of a shleb. Now I relate to that because I’m a bit of a shleb. He got caught up in what he was doing and tended to overlook the details. I tend to do the same thing. OK, he was probably a genius. Am I a genius? Some people say I’m eccentric. Is that the same thing?

And he learned to live with great tension and uncertainty—something I could use. He would be summoned to Rome by the pope, who commissioned him to lay aside all his other work to do something for his “Holy Father”. The others who commissioned work from him would be angry, but they would not be allowed to sue him because the pope was the law in those days and he was under the pope’s protection. Then his protector would die, the project he was working on would be abandoned at the command of the new pope and he would find himself without pay for the project he was working on and back to being without protection from lawsuits related to the job he had been doing before the dead pope called him away. Talk about a stressful existence. He lived to be 89, though, and in a day and age when 34 was considered old age.

I don’t know how to load this picture in the right place, but this is a self-portrait.