Michelangelo may have been one of the most creative people ever to live, but his attention to personal hygiene left much to be desired.
The great man’s biographer, Ascanio Condivi, recorded some of Michelangelo’s most egregious habits:
“When he was more robust, he often slept in his clothes and in the boots which he has always worn for reason of cramp, from which he has continually suffered, as much as for anything else. And sometimes he has been so long in taking them off that subsequently along with his boots, he sloughed off his skin, like a snake’s.”
Giorgio Vasari also noted that Michelangelo’s buskins were made of dog-skin and were worn against his skin for so long that the buskins bonded with his legs.
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