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Secondary sourceBook1876

Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti

Aurelio Gotti · 1876

An 1876 Italian biography of Michelangelo by Aurelio Gotti, based on newly found documents and including a catalogue of his works.

A documented Italian biography of Michelangelo compiled using archival records decades after his death.

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Vita di Michelangelo BuonarrotiPDF · 420 pages
Aurelio Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1876. Scanned book, Internet Archive.

About this source

What it is

This is a biography of Michelangelo written in Italian by Aurelio Gotti, director of the Florence galleries, published in 1876. It draws on new documents and includes a catalogue of Michelangelo's artworks and drawings.

Why it matters

Gotti's biography shows how later scholars used archival documents to build a more detailed picture of Michelangelo's life than earlier writers could. The catalogue of works attached to it reflects an effort to organize and understand everything Michelangelo created, which matters for anyone studying his career as a whole.

Look closer

  • Why might finding new documents change how a biographer tells someone's life story?
  • What is the value of attaching a catalogue of artworks to a biography?
  • How might a biography written in Italian in the 1870s differ in audience and purpose from one written in English?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Michelangelo Buonarroti on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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