It was Raphael who got Michelangelo the job painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Michelangelo had no social skills to speak of but the younger Raphael was a world-class schmoozer right out of the gate. He put the bug in Pope Julius II's ear that Michelangelo would be just the man for the job. But he wasn't doing the sculptor and favors, he knew Michelangelo had never painted so much as a picket fence before, much less a major work of art, and he was betting that the would fall flat on his keester.
The outcome reminds me of that scene from "Quigley Down Under," Quigley, referring to a six-shooter, "I said I didn't have much use for one. Didn't say I didn't know how to use it." Michelangelo turned out to be a fair hand with a paint brush, but he preferred to find the statues hiding inside raw blocks of marble to paint and canvas.
As a teen, Michelangelo was sent to live and study in the home of Lorenzo de’ Medici, then one of the most important art patrons in all of Europe. His steady hand with a chisel and paintbrush soon made him the envy of all his fellow pupils. One young rival named Pietro Torrigiano grew so enraged at Michelangelo’s superior talent—and perhaps also his sharp tongue—that he walloped him in the nose, leaving it permanently smashed and disfigured. “I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles,” Torrigiano later bragged, “and this mark of mine he will carry with him to the grave.”