Death of Michelangelo

February 18, 1564

Michelangelo Buonarroti died in his rented Roman house at almost eighty-nine, still chiseling on an unfinished Pieta that would go to his grave. His body was smuggled to Florence for a state funeral. Four generations of Italian sculptors had grown up measuring themselves against his shoulder. His final Rondanini Pieta, stripped of grandeur and reduced to ghostly merging figures, seemed to anticipate modern sculpture by four centuries.