Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and the David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in life he designed the dome of St Peter's Basilica in the same city and revolutionised classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of pilasters.
Uniquely for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of
Michelangelo during his own lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari,
proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since
the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have
currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often
called Il Divino ("the divine one"), an appropriate sobriquet
given his intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by
his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring
grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's
impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major
movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism.
