In retrospect one's life is subject to invention and distortion. Documentation is often scanty, and what survives rarely predicts a famous life. Indeed, fame begins with the mundane: a messy birth, a crying baby, health and sickness, parents, family, schooling. Later, we consciously and unconsciously edit our lives: saving some papers, throwing much away; telling and retelling certain stories and suppressing much more. By the time a biographer relates a life, much of it has faded into well-tailored memory, an open arena for creative retelling or outright invention.

The first surviving letter from Michelangelo's hand, as we have seen, is the one he wrote from Rome in 1496, and which, thanks to its rich detail, permits us to reconstruct the artist's first days in the Eternal City. In contrast, by age twenty-one, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had written more than two hundred letters. For the first two decades of Michelangelo's life, we are forced to rely on a few documents, less than a half-dozen letters, and the adulatory biographies of his first champions, Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi.

“UNDER A FATEFUL STAR”

Shortly after the birth of his second son, Lodovico Buonarroti made a record, dating it according to Florentine practice: