Michelangelo

I am still learning. I wrote this at the age of eighty-seven, and I meant it. The man who believes he has mastered his craft has already begun to decline. Mastery is not a destination. It is the recognition that you will never finish climbing, and that this is not tragedy but gift.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. This is not a metaphor — or rather, it is a metaphor that describes a real experience. Before a single blow of the chisel, the form already exists inside the stone. The sculptor's task is subtraction, not addition. The painter adds. The sculptor reveals. This is why I consider sculpture the...

The Last Judgment, altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, completed 1541. I was sixty-six years old. The Pope wanted it repainted because I had shown the saints nude. I refused. I told him: tell the Pope to reform the world first, and the painting will reform itself. He did not respond. The nudes remained.

I told the Pope I was a sculptor, not a painter. He told me I was to paint the ceiling of his chapel. I spent four years on a scaffold, lying on my back, painting a surface of some five hundred square metres, while wet plaster dripped into my eyes and the Pope sent messengers below asking when it would be finished.

I wrote a poem about it: My beard turns...

The Sistine Chapel ceiling took four years. I painted it lying on my back on scaffolding sixty feet above the floor. My neck was permanently bent afterward; I could only read letters by holding them above my head. My vision was damaged. My hands were scarred. Pope Julius had designed the ceiling; I redesigned it — adding the nine scenes of Genesis, the...

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. I spent four years on my back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because the commission as originally described was too small. I kept expanding it until it told the whole story of creation.

Pope Julius II gave me the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508. I told him I was a sculptor, not a painter. He told me to paint it anyway. I lay on scaffolding for four years, my neck twisted back, paint dripping into my eyes. I wrote a poem about it: 'My beard towards Heaven, I feel the back of my brain upon my neck.'

The Creation of Adam is the centre panel,...

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. I repainted a section of the Sistine ceiling fifteen times because the light fell wrong. My patron thought I was wasting his money. I was saving his legacy — and mine, which is all an artist truly owns.

I have been working on the David for two years. The block of marble had been abandoned by two previous sculptors — Agostino di Duccio began it in 1464 and left it unfinished; Antonio Rossellino attempted it and gave up. The block was considered ruined. I asked to see it. I saw the figure inside it.

He is not the victorious David of Donatello, with the...

The David is seventeen feet tall, cut from a single block of Carrara marble that had been quarried in 1464 and left abandoned — damaged, they said, by a previous sculptor who had made a poor incision near the legs. I worked around the damage.

I showed him at the moment before the battle, not after. Not the triumphant boy holding a giant head. The hand is...

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. This is not mysticism. The sculptor's art is a process of subtraction — the form exists in potential in the stone; the sculptor reveals it by removing everything that is not the form. I spent three years on the David. I began by studying the block — its grain, its flaws, its existing...

I have never been a painter or a sculptor in the sense of running a shop. I have always been something else that happened to use paint or stone. What I am trying to say with marble is what language refuses to say directly. If it could be said in words I would have been a poet, not a sculptor.