Famous Personality ( Arts )

1. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Sculptor, architect, painter

He was a Renaissance sculptor, architect, painter, and poet. Michelangelo was born near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany, Italy in 1475. His father, Lodovico, was the resident magistrate in Caprese. However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence, Italy and later lived with a sculptor and his wife in the town of Settignano, Italy where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm.

Against his father's wishes, Michelangelo chose to be the apprentice of Domenico Ghirlandaio for three years starting in 1488. Impressed, Domenico recommended him to the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended Lorenzo's school and was influenced by many prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art

After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici (new head of the Medici family), refused to support Michelangelo's artwork. So Michelangelo decided to leave Florence and stay in Bologna, Italy. Four years later, Michelangelo returned to Florence where he produced arguably his most famous work, the marble Michelangelo's David.
Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome in 1503 by the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However, under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. The most famous of those were the monumental paintings on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, which took four years (1508 - 1512) to complete. Due to those interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years without ever finishing it.

Pope Paul III commissioned the fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, and Michelangelo worked on it from 1534 to 1541. Then in 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. On February 18 1564, Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 89.

2. Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
Composer of Classical Music

Known widely for the Titan Watches’ signature tune, which is Mozart’s symphony number 25, he was a prolific and highly influential composer of Classical music. His enormous output of more than six hundred compositions includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of European composers, and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire.

Mozart was born to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart, in the front room of nine Getreidegasse in Salzburg, the capital of the sovereign Archbishopric of
Salzburg, in what is now Austria, then part of the Holy Roman Empire.

Mozart's father Leopold (1719–1787) was one of Europe's leading musical teachers. His influential textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule was published in 1756, the year of Mozart's birth (English, as "A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing”. He was deputy Kapellmeister to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, and a prolific and successful composer of instrumental music. Leopold gave up composing when his son's outstanding musical talents became evident. They first came to light when Wolfgang was about three years old, and Leopold, proud of Wolfgang's achievements, gave him intensive musical training, including instruction in clavier, violin, and organ. Leopold was Wolfgang's only teacher in his earliest years. A note by Leopold records that little Wolfgang had learned several of the pieces at the age of four. Mozart's first compositions, a small Andante (K. 1a) and Allegro (K. 1b), were written in 1761, when he was five years old.

During his formative years, Mozart made several European journeys, beginning with an exhibition in 1762 at the Court of the Elector of Bavaria in Munich, then in the same year at the Imperial Court in Vienna and Prague. A long concert tour spanning three and a half years followed, taking him with his father to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London (where Wolfgang Amadeus played with the famous Italian cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri), The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zürich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. During this trip Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other great composers.

On September 23, 1777, accompanied by his mother, Mozart began a tour of Europe that included Munich, Mannheim, and Paris. In Mannheim he became acquainted with members of the Mannheim orchestra, the best in Europe at the time. He fell in love with Aloysia Weber, who later broke up the relationship with him. He was to marry her sister Constanze some four years later in Vienna. During his unsuccessful visit to Paris, his mother died (1778).

The year 1782 was an auspicious one for Mozart's career: his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was a great success and he began a series of concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos as director of the ensemble and soloist.

Mozart's final illness and death are difficult topics for scholars, obscured by romantic legends and replete with conflicting theories. Mozart died around 1 a.m. on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. Some days earlier, with the onset of his illness, he had largely ceased work on his final composition, the Requiem.