Italian compound of Michele and Angelo, meaning who is like God and angel or messenger.
Michelangelo is a compound Italian name joining Michele — the Italian form of Michael, from the Hebrew Mikha'el, meaning "who is like God?" — with Angelo, from the Greek angelos, meaning "messenger" or "angel." The combination produces something close to "angelic messenger of God" or "who among angels is like God," a name of almost overwhelming spiritual ambition that seems to have prophesied the extraordinary life of its most famous bearer.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, born in 1475 in Caprese, Tuscany, became the artist against whom all subsequent Western artists would be measured. He painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling — a project he undertook reluctantly and transformed into the most recognized fresco in human history. He carved the David, the Pietà, and Moses.
He designed the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Giorgio Vasari, his contemporary biographer, called him "divine," and the Renaissance word terribilità — awesome, overwhelming, almost frightening in its power — was coined partly to describe him. The name and the man became so fused that using it for a child is inescapably a kind of tribute.
In popular culture the name received a playful twentieth-century afterlife when it was assigned to one of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the creative, nunchuck-wielding one in the orange mask — introducing it to generations of children as something energetic and loveable. For parents who choose it today, usually in Italian or Italian-diaspora communities, Michelangelo is a declaration of cultural pride and artistic aspiration, a name whose very syllables carry the weight of the Renaissance.