The 12 Most Famous Michelangelo Sculptures, from the Pietà to David

Stand in front of David and the first surprise is the scale: 17 feet of marble, carved between 1501 and 1504 by a man in his twenties. It's the most famous of all Michelangelo sculptures, and it's one of twelve worth knowing. They run below in the order he carved them, from a relief he cut at about 15 to a Pietà he was still working on six days before he died in 1564. Seven of the twelve are in Florence.

Twelve works, in the order he carved them

Painting came second for him. He didn't consider himself a painter, and only four easel paintings are credited to him. The earliest, the Saint Anthony panel he painted at 12 or 13, hangs at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and it's the only Michelangelo painting in North or South America. That short list is why the handful of Michelangelo paintings get so much attention.

A teenager in Florence, a young star in Rome

1. Madonna of the Stairs (c. 1490), Casa Buonarroti, Florence

He was about 15 when he carved this Virgin and Child, a marble panel roughly 22 by 16 inches, dated to around 1490. It's an open homage to Donatello's stiacciato, a relief so shallow it reads almost like a drawing, and Vasari thought it "seems to be by Donatello himself, save that it possesses more grace and design." Look for how little the figures rise from the stone.

2. Battle of the Centaurs (1490–1492), Casa Buonarroti, Florence

Same museum, same teenager, opposite mood. This knot of fighting bodies was made for Lorenzo the Magnificent on a theme suggested by the poet Poliziano, and it was probably left unfinished when Lorenzo died in the spring of 1492. He kept it all his life anyway. Find the marks of the subbia chisel, left unsmoothed on the surface.

3. Bacchus (1496–1497), Bargello, Florence

The client said no. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, a collector of antique sculpture, ordered this Bacchus and then refused it as too sinful. It passed to the banker Jacopo Galli and, in 1572, to the Medici in Florence. At 203 cm (80 inches), the wine god is plainly drunk, eyes rolling, body teetering on his rock. Walk around it for the little satyr eating the grapes that slip from his left hand.

4. Pietà (1498–1499), St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

Michelangelo was 23 when the French cardinal Jean de Bilhères Lagraulas ordered this Pietà for his tomb, and he cut it from a single block of Carrara marble in nine months. It's the only work he ever signed. The story goes that he overheard someone credit it to another sculptor, Cristoforo Solari. Look for his name on the sash across Mary's chest.

Why does Mary look younger than her son? Michelangelo's answer, as his biographer Condivi recorded it: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste?"

In 1964 the Vatican lent the statue to the New York World's Fair. On May 21, 1972, Laszlo Toth struck it 15 times with a hammer and broke off Mary's arm at the elbow and part of her nose. Restored, it now sits behind bulletproof acrylic glass.

5. David (1501–1504), Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

The block was a leftover. Agostino di Duccio started on it in 1464, and Antonio Rossellino was hired to resume the work in 1476; then it lay outdoors in the cathedral workshop's yard for another 25 years. On August 16, 1501, the cathedral's board of works assigned it to Michelangelo, then 26, for a fee of 400 ducats.

The finished statue stands 517 cm with its carved base and weighs 5,560 kilos. It was unveiled on September 8, 1504, at the entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio. Check the oversized right hand; the head and hands are unusually large for the body.

In August 1873 it moved indoors, then waited nine years in a wooden box for the Tribune built to hold it. The copy in the piazza dates from 1910.

6. Madonna of Bruges (1503–1505), Church of Our Lady, Bruges

Two Bruges cloth merchants, Giovanni and Alessandro Moscheroni (Mouscron), bought this Madonna in 1504 for 100 ducats, though it had been meant for the Piccolomini altar in Siena Cathedral. Jan van Moeskroen gave it to the Church of Our Lady in 1514, and it was the first Michelangelo sculpture to leave Italy in his lifetime.

It has been carried off twice since. French revolutionaries took it in 1794, and it returned after Waterloo in 1815. In 1944 it was smuggled to Germany wrapped in mattresses in a Red Cross truck and found a year later in a salt mine at Altaussee, Austria, the rescue shown in the 2014 film The Monuments Men. Notice the Child about to step away from his mother, held only loosely by her left hand.

Two tombs that took over his middle years

Pope Julius II ordered his tomb in 1505, and the first design called for over 40 statues. He died in 1513. The plan was scaled back, and the tomb was finished only in 1545, in San Pietro in Vincoli rather than St. Peter's, where Julius had meant it to stand. Items 7 to 9 come from it.

7. Moses (c. 1513–1515), San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

Moses got the place of honor: the center of the bottom tier of the finished tomb, with Rachel and Leah beside him, both carved by Michelangelo in 1545. He is 235 cm high, seated, and hard to walk away from.

Look for the two horns on his head. They come from the Latin Vulgate Bible, which describes Moses' face as cornuta, "horned," in chapter 34 of Exodus. Sigmund Freud gave the statue a whole essay in 1914, "The Moses of Michelangelo."

8. Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave (1513–1515), Louvre, Paris

Both were carved for the Julius tomb and left out of its final version. Michelangelo gave them to his friend Roberto Strozzi in 1546, and Strozzi offered them to the king of France. After stops at Anne de Montmorency's château at Écouen and with Cardinal Richelieu, they entered the Louvre in 1794. The Dying Slave is 2.28 meters tall (about 7 feet 6 inches), the Rebellious Slave 2.15 meters, and you'll find the pair in Room 403 of the Denon wing.

Early biographers read them as conquered territories, or as the liberal arts in chains. Nobody has settled it, and the figures are better for it. Look for the monkey carved behind the Dying Slave's left knee.

9. The four Prisoners (1519–1534), Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

Four more figures from the Julius tomb wait in Florence: the Young Slave, the Bearded Slave, Atlas and the Awakening Slave. After Michelangelo's death they went to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, who set them in the Grotta del Buontalenti in the Boboli Gardens. Since 1909 they have lined the corridor that leads to the Tribune, so you pass them on the way to David. None is finished. Atlas, 277 cm tall, has a barely roughed-out face. Check the squared sides of the original block, still clear around Atlas.

10. The Medici tombs, with Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk (1519–1534), Florence

Two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, commissioned the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, and Michelangelo designed both the room and its sculpture. Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, got Night and Day on his tomb; Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, got Dusk and Dawn. Michelangelo left Florence in 1534, never to return, with the chapel unfinished.

Night (1526–1531) is the one to find. When Giovanni Strozzi wrote that she only slept and would speak if woken, Michelangelo replied in her voice: "My sleep is dear to me, and more dear this being of stone, as long as the agony and shame last." Find the owl and the poppies carved with her. Michelangelo's secret room, a hidden space with wall drawings, can be visited by reservation.

The last Pietàs, carved in his seventies and eighties

11. Florentine Pietà (1547–1555), Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

Past 70, Michelangelo began a Pietà for his own tomb, meant for Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The hooded Nicodemus is taken to be his own face. Then he turned on it. A vein in the marble kept frustrating him and his servant Urbino kept pressing him to finish; he broke parts of it, and Christ's left leg is still missing. Francesco Bandini acquired it and had an apprentice, Tiberio Calcagni, reattach the limbs. It was sold to Cosimo III in 1671, and he brought it to Florence. Look closely at the face under Nicodemus's hood.

12. Rondanini Pietà (1552–1564), Castello Sforzesco, Milan

The last one. He began it in 1552 and worked on it all day just six days before he died on February 18, 1564, aged 88. In those final days he cut the first version away until only a detached right arm of Christ was left of it, broken off just above the elbow. The statue stood for centuries in the courtyard of Palazzo Rondanini in Rome. Milan bought it in 1952, and since May 2, 2015, it has had its own museum in the old Spanish Hospital of the Castello Sforzesco.

What is Michelangelo's most famous creation?

David, for most people. Among his marbles the Pietà in St. Peter's is the usual runner-up. Count painting and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, frescoed 1508–1512, belongs in the same breath; he later painted The Last Judgment in that chapel, in 1536–1541. If you can see only one thing he made, make it David.

Did Leonardo da Vinci know Michelangelo?

Yes. On January 25, 1504, Leonardo sat on the committee that chose where David would stand, alongside Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Perugino. In the same years the two were given facing walls in the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio: Leonardo was to paint The Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo its companion, The Battle of Cascina.

Neither mural survives; Michelangelo got no further than a complete cartoon before Pope Julius II called him to Rome. In 1513–1516 the older artist lived in the Vatican's Belvedere Courtyard, where Michelangelo was also active.

Where to see Michelangelo sculptures today

Plan on Florence: seven of the twelve are there, spread over five museums, and Rome and Vatican City hold two more. The Bargello also has the Pitti Tondo and the Brutus bust. In Rome, the Risen Christ stands to the left of the main altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a marble Young Archer attributed to him, and the Kimbell in Fort Worth has his first painting.

A Michelangelo for your own wall

Marble won't hang over a sofa, which is why Michelangelo on a living-room wall usually means one of his paintings. Art & See paints hand-made oil copies of Michelangelo, the Saint Anthony panel among them, each one by hand. If you're looking beyond him, start with the masterpieces people know on sight.

Sources

• Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze, David
• Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze, history of the museum
• Basilica di San Pietro, The Pietà of Saint Peter's
• Casa Buonarroti, Madonna della Scala
• Casa Buonarroti, Battle of the Centaurs
• Musée du Louvre, Dying Slave (MR 1590)
• Musei del Bargello, Cappelle Medicee
• KERA News, Michelangelo's first painting at the Kimbell