Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni exercised a huge influence on the development of Western art. He is considered a nominee for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with Leonardo da Vinci. He has been recognized for the greatest living artist in his time, and ever now has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Giorgio Vasari proposed that he was the high point of all artistic achievement of the Renaissance. In his era Michelangelo was characterized as Il Divino ("the divine one").

One of the qualities most respected by his contemporaries was his "terribilità", a sense of greatness, which raises admiration, and that's driving the next generation of artists to imitate Michelangelo by trying one very passionate and very personal style, leading them to the mannerisms. In this way Michelangelo, indirectly, marked the beginning of the next major movement in Western art - that of Mannerism.