Italian artist and poet Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, better known as Michelangelo, was BOTD in 1475. Born in Caprese, Tuscany to an impoverished family, he was raised in Florence during the height of the Italian Renaissance. At 13, he was apprenticed to the painter Ghirlandaio, later attending the Platonic Academy. After working for the Medici family, he moved to Rome in 1496. His first significant commission, the Pietà, a marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus’ dead body, was an immediate success. Returning to Florence, he was commissioned to create a marble statue of David as a symbol of Florentine freedom. A work of incredible technical skill and erotic power, it established him as Rome’s pre-eminent sculptor. In 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned him to begin work on his tomb, which he spent the next 40 years trying to complete. His most ambitious work, the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, took four years to complete. Now considered the pinnacle of High Renaissance art, its famous scenes include the Creation of Adam, and an astonishing number of decorative male nudes whom Michelangelo called “The Ignudi”. His fresco The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Chapel caused controversy with his muscled and daringly naked Jesus. In 1546, he was appointed architect of St Peter’s Basilica, a project that consumed the rest of his life. A lifelong bachelor, he wrote a series of love sonnets to the young Roman nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri and to his pupil Cecchino del Bracci. He had a number of crushes on his teenage models, many of whom stole from him. He died in 1564, aged 88. His exquisite and highly erotic depictions of the male body are perhaps the most compelling evidence of his homosexuality. Despite this, historians and filmmakers have chosen to depict Michelangelo as an ascetic, chastely in love with his friend Vittoria Colonna, and explain away the homoeroticism of his work in religious terms, notably in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy starring Charleston Heston as Michelangelo.