Best known for his artistic achievements, Michelangelo not only filled hundreds of sheets with drawings, sketches, and doodles, but he also composed his own words. In Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, author Leonard Barkan vividly narrates the important role the written word played in Michelangelo’s monumental public output.

Barkan, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, unearths the famed artist’s notes, masterpieces, workaday memos, poetry, letters, and personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody’s eyes but his own.