There is no record of Michelangelo saying or writing it. “Ancora imparo” was the motto on a 16th-century drawing of an old man in a child’s go-cart, which Giorgio Vasari’s Lives credits to the painter Domenico Giuntalodi. English writers from the early 1800s credited that design to Michelangelo, and the saying stuck to him.
What it means
Learning never ends: however old or accomplished you are, there is still more to learn. The original image made the point with a hint of irony — an old man back in a child’s go-cart, with an hourglass before him.
Where it comes from
In his life of the painter Niccolò Soggi, Vasari lists drawings by Soggi’s pupil Domenico Giuntalodi that were sent to the viceroy Ferrante Gonzaga, including “an old man in a child’s go-cart, drawn by the same hand and published in engraving, with letters that ran thus, ‘Ancora imparo’” (De Vere translation). The art historian Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa discusses the same engraving in her 1988 article on Giuntalodi.
Richard Duppa’s life of Michelangelo (first published 1806; passage checked in the 1861 Bohn edition) described “a design by him, of an old man, with a long beard, in a child’s go-cart, and an hour-glass before him” with the words “anchora inparo”. Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature repeated it more cautiously as “a device said to be invented by him”. Wikiquote now lists the saying as misattributed to Michelangelo.