What’s your best guess: Was the artist Michelangelo wealthy?
Well, defying all things I thought I knew, he was incredibly rich.
I mean, who knew?
Is it possible that the myth of the “starving artist” is not true?
You bet.
It almost seems like he knew about stealth wealth.
In the end, Professor Hatfield uncovered a fortune worth roughly $ 47 million today, making Michelangelo the richest artist of the Renaissance. And to this day, this is a story that surprises us. We are accustomed to a certain story about artists, one that says they are barely getting by. But Michelangelo did not suffer or starve for his work. A multimillionaire and successful entrepreneur, he was in the words of one journalist a “pivotal figure in the transition of creative geniuses from people regarded, and paid, as craftsmen to people accorded a different level of treatment and compensation.” In other words, the master sculptor and painter wasn’t just some art school dropout struggling for his art. He was a rainmaker.
-Jeff Goins, Real Artists Don’t Starve