Michelangelo
Considered himself a sculptor, hated painting, and spent four years on his back under the Sistine ceiling
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in a village in Tuscany and sent as a baby to a wet nurse in Settignano, a town of stonecutters, where he later joked that he had taken in hammer and chisel with her milk. His father, a minor official with pretensions to gentility, was appalled when the boy wanted to be an artist and beat him for it. He was apprenticed to the painter Ghirlandaio at thirteen and soon after taken into the Medici household, where a rival broke his nose in a fight and left his face permanently misshapen.
At 24 he carved the Pieta in St Peter's. Hearing visitors attribute it to another sculptor, he crept back at night and cut his name across the strap on the Virgin's chest, the only work he ever signed. His David was hewn from a huge block that other sculptors had abandoned as ruined.
He considered himself a sculptor and did not want the job of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Pope Julius II insisted. For four years he stood on scaffolding with his head bent back and paint dripping into his eyes, writing a sonnet about the goitre he was developing and the way the work had ruined his body.
He kept going for another half century: the Last Judgment, the Medici tombs, the dome of St Peter's, which he designed in his seventies for no fee. He was working on a final Pieta days before he died in Rome in 1564, aged 88.