Michelangelo is part of a series of seventeen introductory biographies of great artists that Ripley wrote for young adults. In addition to Michelangelo, Ripley's more successful biographies include Leonardo da Vinci, which supplies reproductions of Leonardo's fascinating drawings of visionary projects, such as a flying machine; Durer, which reproduces the artist's striking self-portraits at ages thirteen and twenty; and Velasquez, Hokusai, and Copley, which provide sharp insights into the cultures of seventeenth-century Spain, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan, and eighteenth-century America, respectively.