What Were You Doing at Fifteen?

Michelangelo’s Madonna della Scala © A. Harrison

While I struggled with braces on my teeth and conjugating the past tense in French and German, Michelangelo was carving his first works. The braces were not a pretty sight. The Madonna della Scala is.

At the age of thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed by his father to Ghirlandaio’s studios. Two years later, after a request from Lorenzo il Magnifico for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo to…