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BASIC PLOT: .
Just as his father, the young Florentine boy examining his reflection in the mirror of his cramped bedroom, while most of Florence slept, was unfortunate enough to have been born at the wrong time. Moreover, just as his father, Michelangelo Buonarroti would inherit a longevity of life during which he would encounter great people, making long-lasting friendships with some of the most famous in Europe, discovering heated rivalries and malices between the most powerful and feared men of over half a century and forge passionate eternal love affairs with the most beautiful women of Italy. For now however Michelangelo would have to attend to more urgent matters in particular his application for apprenticeship under Florence's greatest painter of the time, Ghirlandaio. .
It took little convincing for the great master to discover the talent in Michelangelo that his apprentice and Michelangelo's only friend, Granacci, had spoken about. The greatness of this talent was perhaps best exemplified when Ghirlandaio actually decided to pay Michelangelo for his apprenticeship in order to appease the boy's extremely frugal yet lazy father Lodovico. Despite his impoverished family's protests, Michelangelo continued his apprenticeship, he was working as an artist, for once in his life he found friendships and a feeling of belonging through the other apprentices; nothing could draw him away from his vocation except of course, the passion and yearning that had drawn him to the apprenticeship. .
When he first applied to become Ghirlandaio's apprentice, he had done so only because his birth had missed the great era of Florentine sculpting by several decades. Since he was a small child living on the family farm in Settigano, near the rock quarries of the Topolinos, Michelangelo yearned to wield the hammer and chisel, to model shapeless and plain marble into models of beauty. His master understood this quiet plainly and thus when Lorenzo Medici, the most richest and most powerful man in Europe after the pope, requested two of his apprentices for his new school of sculpting, Ghirlandaio knew plainly who he must release from his contract.