Excerpt from Michelangelo by Miles J. Unger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As it turned out, father and son were engaged in an unequal contest. The willful boy soon broke down Lodovico's resistance, perhaps in part because even the small salary he would draw as an apprentice in Ghirlandaio's bustling atelier meant that he would be adding to the family coffers. The 24 gold florins the Ghirlandaio brothers were to pay Lodovico to acquire Michelangelo's services for three years could make a real difference to a family barely keeping its head above water. From this day forward, and increasingly with the passage of years, the artist will become the principal support for his feckless relatives.

Later in life Michelangelo sought to conceal the truth about his initiation into the artistic profession. One of the most telling examples of the artist altering his biography comes in Condivi's discussion of his earliest training. In 1550, Michelangelo's younger friend and colleague Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (usually shortened to Lives of the Artists), a magisterial collective biography of the greatest Italian masters of the last three centuries. The work, in many ways an homage to his famous friend, culminated in a life of Michelangelo himself, the first time such an honor had been accorded a living artist. Here, Vasari offered an effusive portrait of the great man. "The most blessed Ruler of the Universe," he wrote,

seeing the infinite futility of all that toil, the most ardent studies without fruit and the presumptuous opinions of men—farther from the truth than shadow is from the light—and to relieve us of such errors, took pity by sending to us here on earth a spirit with universal mastery of every art. . . . And he chose to endow this man as well with true moral philosophy and with every ornament of sweet poetry, so that the world might admire him and hold him up as a model to be followed, in life, in work, in holiness of character and all human striving, so that we believed him heaven-sent rather than of this world.

Despite this treatment more appropriate to the life of a saint than of an artist, Michelangelo was unhappy with some of the details contained in Vasari's biography, and prevailed upon Ascanio Condivi to "correct" the record. Perhaps the most telling change has to do with Michelangelo's relationship to his first teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, a prolific frescoist beloved by Florentine patricians who enjoyed seeing themselves flatteringly portrayed in the religious scenes with which he covered walls and ceilings of the city's churches. Directly contradicting Vasari's account, Condivi insists that Michelangelo "received absolutely no assistance from him," claiming instead that Ghirlandaio's attitude toward the talented young artist was one of "envy."

Denying Ghirlandaio's role in launching Michelangelo's career was such a transparent deception that even the usually accommodating Vasari balked, going to great lengths in the second edition of his Lives (1568) to rebut Condivi's claims by quoting at length from the actual contract.

Why did Michelangelo try so hard to alter the record? One explanation is that throughout his career Michelangelo claimed sculpture as his principal art; admitting that his formal training was as a painter in the shop of the era's most successful practitioner of this medium tended to undercut that argument. More significantly, the narrative of his apprenticeship reveals that he began his career like any other youth wishing to become an artist, grinding colors, preparing brushes, doing all the menial chores associated with an entry-level position. Far from suggesting an aristocrat pursuing independently a high and cerebral calling, the true story of his apprenticeship betrayed the artisanal origins of Michelangelo's glorious career.

In fact, the kind of bottega Ghirlandaio ran was antithetical to everything Michelangelo stood for: it was an art factory, turning out panel paintings and frescoes almost like an assembly line, with apprentices and assistants suppressing their own individuality in order to produce a uniform product. When Michelangelo said he never kept a shop, he must have had in mind his own introduction to the art world, an initiation he still regarded with contempt.

Excerpted from Michelangelo by Miles J Unger. Copyright © 2014 by Miles J Unger. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.