Michelangelo

The sculptor who painted the Sistine Chapel on his back spent four years hating every second of it.

Michelangelo didn't want to be a painter. Pope Julius II didn't care. What followed was a brutal standoff between Renaissance Italy's most stubborn artist and its most violent pope - one that produced the ceiling that defined Western art for five centuries. But the Sistine Chapel was just one battle in a life that careened from triumph to exhaustion on repeat.

• Why a failed banker's son learned to carve marble instead of going to school
• The botched block of stone he turned into David (and the political circus that followed)
• How he spent four years painting 300 figures while his back seized up and paint dripped in his eyes
• The tomb project that haunted him for 40 years and never got finished
• What happened when he returned to Florence at 70 to build a dome nobody thought was possible

This is Michelangelo without the mythology. The genius who couldn't stop working, couldn't please his clients, and couldn't escape the projects that made him miserable.

Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.