You Don't Have to Starve (to Be an Artist)
The Surprising Story of Michelangelo's Millions—and What It Means for Us Today
Note: My Wall Street Journal bestselling book Real Artists Don’t Starve is only 99 cents on Kindle for the entire month of July. I’ll be sharing excerpts from the book on Substack throughout the month, including some of my favorite stories. Feel free to share these pieces with others who might be interested. And if you haven’t picked up a copy of the book, you can grab it here for only a buck (this offer may not be available in all countries).
In 1995, an American professor made an unusual discovery.
At Syracuse University in Florence, Rab Hatfield was trying to match the scenes of the Sistine Chapel to the dates Michelangelo had painted each of them. Since the artist had received commissions in various installments, the professor thought there might be a paper trail.
So he went to the city archives. Surprised at how easy it was to locate five-hundred-year-old bank records, he began reconstructing a more accurate timeline for how the most famous ceiling in the world came to be.
And that’s when he saw it.
“I was really looking for something else!” the professor yelled into the phone from his office in Italy, decades later. “Every time I run across something, it’s because I was looking for something else, which I consider real discovery. It’s when you don’t expect it that you really discover something.”
With a PhD from Harvard, Professor Hatfield had begun his career at Yale in 1966 before moving to Syracuse University in 1971, and in all that time of teaching art history, he had never encountered anything like this. What he found in those records was not what you would expect to find digging around in the bank account of an artist, even one whose fame would grow with each passing century.
“I don’t know how much you know about Michelangelo,” he told me, “but usually they taught us that he kind of struggled like Vincent van Gogh.”
For centuries, this is what historians believed about the great Renaissance master. He was just another Starving Artist, struggling to make ends meet. Michelangelo himself embraced this image, living frugally and often complaining about money. He once wrote in a poem that his art had left him “poor, old and working as a servant of others.”
But it turns out he wasn’t telling the truth.
When Rab Hatfield dug into those old bank records, the truth about the Renaissance’s most famous artist was finally revealed. He was not struggling at all. He was not poor. And he was not starving for his art—a fact we have been getting wrong ever since.
Michelangelo was, in fact, very rich. One record showed a balance of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a rare sum of money for an artist at the time. When he saw those figures, the professor forgot all about the Sistine Chapel. With his curiosity piqued, he went to see if there were more bank records. And there were more—many more.
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.
When I asked Rab Hatfield what Michelangelo’s millions meant for us today, he said, “I don’t think it means a whole lot.” But I disagree. I think this changes everything.
Birth of a Myth
Two hundred years after Michelangelo died, Henri Murger was born the son of a tailor and concierge in France. Living in Paris, he was surrounded by creative geniuses and dreamed of joining them but grew frustrated with his failure to find financial security.
In 1847, Murger published Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of stories that playfully romanticized poverty. The result was some literary acclaim, persistent struggle, and an untimely end to a penniless life.
The book limped along after the author’s death, being adapted first as the opera La Bohème and later as a film, eventually achieving widespread acclaim with spinoffs, including Rent and Moulin Rouge.
Murger’s Scènes launched the concept of the Starving Artist into the public’s understanding as the model for a creative life. To this day, it endures as the picture for what we imagine when we think of the word artist.
The story of the Starving Artist overshadows the quiet, relatively unknown tale of Michelangelo’s success and has become our most popular understanding of what’s possible for creative people—which is to say, not much.
Today, we find the remnants of this story nearly everywhere we look. It is the advice we give a friend who dreams of painting for a living, what we tell a coworker who wants to write a novel, or even the tale we tell our children when they head out into the real world.
Be careful, we say ominously. Don’t be too creative. You just might starve.
What we forget, however, is that the story of the Starving Artist is a myth. And like all myths, it may be a powerful story, one we can orient our entire lives around.
But in the end, it is still just a story.
Thanks to the power of this myth, many of us take the safe route in life. We become lawyers instead of actresses, bankers instead of poets, and doctors instead of painters. We hedge our bets and hide from our true calling, choosing less risky careers, because it seems easier. Nobody wants to struggle, after all, so we keep our passion a hobby and follow a predictable path toward mediocrity.
But what if you could make a living as an artist? What would that change about the way we approach our work and how we consider creativity’s importance in our world today? What would that mean for the careers we choose and the paths we encourage our kids to follow?
In the early Renaissance, artists did not have reputations for being diligent workers. They were considered manual laborers, receiving meager commissions for their work. Michelangelo changed that.
After him, every artist began to see a “new pattern, a new way of doing things,” in the words of William Wallace, professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis. Michelangelo “established the idea that an artist could become a new figure in society and have a higher social standing, and also that they could become financially successful.”
Michelangelo did not need to starve for his creations, and neither do you. When the painter of the Sistine Chapel amassed an incredible fortune and secured his legacy as one of history’s masters, he broke the glass ceiling for future generations.
Today, however, his contribution has been all but forgotten. We have bought into the Myth of the Starving Artist, thinking of artists as unfortunate Bohemians who struggle at the lowest end of society.
Rarely do we think of creatives as wealthy or successful, even cracking jokes about the wastefulness of art degrees and theater classes. We have heard how pursuing creativity is not a safe career move, whether that means chasing an interest in literature, music, or some other endeavor.
All my life, I heard it from well-meaning teachers, friends, and relatives. The advice was always the same: Get a good degree, have something to fall back on, and don’t quit your day job. Creativity, though a nice outlet for self-expression, is not something we think a person should go “all in” on for a career. Because, odds are, you’ll starve, right?
The truth, though, is quite different.
Sometimes, an artist does succeed: a singer releases a platinum record, an author hits a bestseller list, a filmmaker launches a blockbuster. We tend to dismiss these moments as rare instances of an artist getting lucky or selling out.
But what if that wasn’t the whole picture?
When we look at history’s most famous artists, we see something curious. It’s the same thing we observe in the lives of creatives making a living today. When we hear the cautionary tales and warnings about what it means to be an artist, there’s an important truth we must embrace:
You don’t have to starve.
To get your copy of Real Artists Don’t Starve for only 99 cents, go here.
To see an interview I did about the book with Chase Jarvis from Creative Live, check out the link below.
Thank you for this story. I didn’t know anything about Michelangelo as an entrepreneur who opened doors to wealth for other artists. Before reading this, my understanding of artists and craftsmen of the Renaissance was that they constituted the first “middle class”. Finally, there was a “in between” extreme wealth and the abject poverty of all of the others.
Because of the skills they brought to the table in the ornate carvings and plastering, etc., in the building of the homes and palaces of the very wealthy, artisans were not only very well paid but also respected by their benefactors.
My personal experience with the phenomenon “starving artist” myth was my husband’s choice of career. He wanted to be a painter. But after graduating 4th in our class of 811, everyone, including his father, who held the first strings for paying for college thought he was wasting his brain by even wanting to pursue Art as a career.
Lance thus started college with the idea that he would pursue a degree in chemistry. He later became a school psychologist, earning two masters degrees in less time than it would have taken normal people to get one.
In his brilliant career in psychology, he brought his creativity to everything he did, developing several innovative approaches to his “day job” working with neurodivergent teens. He continued to paint, as he had time, but there were long periods when he simply didn’t have the time, as he pursued his many other interests at a level of proficiency in all that continues to astound me, his wife of 50 years as of next month.
When Lance retired a few years ago, he again took up painting. What is so remarkable now, though, is that, without anything close to the 10,000 hours of practice often (as wrongly as the “starving artist” idea) as necessary for true mastery of any skill, his paintings are at a level of excellence that is unbelievable.
During the pandemic, he taught himself Mayan. After the pandemic, he facilitated the production of a documentary film, Beyond the Ruins, about a Maya family’s struggle to preserve their culture in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Although I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had Lance pursued his dream of becoming an artist as a career in the first place, it has given me great pleasure, as one whose career was in vocational rehabilitation counseling, to have witnessed Lance’s creativity woven throughout all of the many things he’s done to make a living.
This was really enlightening and intriguing. It is a shame that being creative has that stigma of starving attached to it. There is such a freedom and almost an act of resistance in doing what you love to do.