Many believe Michelangelo's talent was miraculous and untrained, the product of "divine" genius, but the young Michelangelo studied art like any Renaissance apprentice, learning from a master and experimenting with materials and styles. As a grad student in art history, Alan Pascuzzi won a Fulbright scholarship to "apprentice" himself to Michelangelo, studying his extant drawings and copying them to learn the progression of his technique, mastery of anatomy and composition, and understanding of human potential. Pascuzzi also relied on the Renaissance treatise that "Il Divino" himself would have been familiar with, Cennino Cennini's The Craftsman’s Handbook (1399), which was available to apprentices as a kind of textbook of the period.

Pascuzzi's narrative traces Michelangelo's development from student and young artist to master during the period from roughly 1485 to his completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512. Analyzing Michelangelo's burgeoning abilities through copies he himself executed in museums and galleries in Florence and elsewhere, Pascuzzi unlocks the transformation that made him great. At the same time, he narrates his own transformation from student to artist as Michelangelo’s last apprentice.