The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a biographical novel about Michelangelo Buonarroti by the American writer Irving Stone, published in 1961. Stone wrote a dozen novels of this kind, and this one and his earlier book about Vincent van Gogh are the best known of them.

Stone did not work from secondary accounts alone. He lived in Italy for years, visited the places in Rome and Florence that appear in the book, worked in the marble quarries at Carrara, and apprenticed himself to a marble sculptor so that he could describe the craft honestly. The novel's central source is Michelangelo's own correspondence, all 495 letters of which Stone had translated and published separately, and he also worked with the Canadian sculptor Stanley Lewis, who studied Michelangelo's carving methods and tools.

The book is divided into eleven sections, each taking a period of Michelangelo's life: the studio of Ghirlandaio where he began his training, the sculpture garden of Lorenzo de' Medici where he carved his first figure, the palace where he lived as a young man among the Medici, and the years of quarrels with popes and patrons that produced the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Part of the novel was adapted for film in 1965.