The legend of Michelangelo (1475-1564) has endured, undiminished, for 500 years. Scholars like Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Rilke have seen in him a master of the renewal of Western art. Indeed, endowed with an almost superhuman creative genius, Michelangelo incarnates for us the universal man of the Italian Renaissance, and the quality and scope of his oeuvre is uncontested, not even by Leonardo da Vinci works like his Pietà, David, and the Sistine Chapel frescoes are the proof. How was he able, in so few years, to develop the methods behind a body of work worthy of his Greek predecessors? No one has better examined the complexities of the man, the artist, and the age in which he lived than Eugène Müntz. His text, written in clear and pure style, is a literary work in itself, and it is accompanied here by illustrations of an exceptional quality.