From a scene of LOST:
Ludovico Buonarrati, Michelangelo's father. He was a wealthy man. He had no understanding of the divinity in his son, so he beat him. No child of his was going to use his hands for a living. So, Michelangelo learned not to use his hands. Years later a visiting prince came into Michelangelo's studio and found the master staring at a single 18 foot block of marble. Then he knew that the rumors were true -- that Michelangelo had come in everyday for the last four months, stared at the marble, and gone home for his supper. So the prince asked the obvious -- what are you doing? And Michelangelo turned around and looked at him, and whispered, sto lavorando, I'm working. Three years later that block of marble was the statue of David.
I am curious about whether this was just completely made-up or if such an anecdote has any basis in history, or even if it is an anecdote that predates the TV show.
Michelangelo's father was a failed Banker and sometime government worker. He and his family believed they were descended from Aristocracy with no real proof, although opposed he did allow Michelangelo to be apprenticed to Francesco da Urbino,s studio also as a child Michelangelo lived with stone cutters for a while. The story of the princes encounter certainly sounds like something Michelangelo could have said but i doubt it could be verified one way or the other. The block of Marble in question had been acquired by Florentine merchants for another project which had been started then abandoned and was thought to be flawed. It was in Florence for years and i'm sure Michelangelo would have had his eye on it for some time. A major reason Michelangelo received the commission was due to his confidence that he could produce a statue from it. One often overlooked fact about the David that has always amused me, is that as a Jew, David should be circumcised, which i imagine would have proved too controversial for the Florentine of the time.
The line about beating his son is in Condivi(one of the two main biographies of Michelangelo written within his lifetime) but I cannot find the rest of the story in either Condivi or Vasari, and both lavish a great deal of attention on his extensive training as a youth as well as on his extreme youthful skills. Given that both Vasari and Condivi knew Michelangelo personally, I would expect this story to be in one or both of them; perhaps it is a composite of various other stories about patrons being more or less irritated with how slowly he was working? In any case, Vasari specifically notes that Michelangelo produced a wax maquette of what he intended David to look like so he did have some idea what he was going for early on.