The Vatican office that cares for St Peter's Basilica has joined forces with Microsoft to turn Michelangelo's handwriting into a working digital typeface. Named Michelangelus, the font was commissioned by the Fabbrica di San Pietro to mark four hundred years since the consecration of the basilica in 1626, and it will be distributed free to hundreds of millions of Microsoft 365 users worldwide. The design grew out of an extended period of archival research. Engineers from Microsoft and designers from the Italian-German studio studiogusto studied letters, memoranda and architectural plans that Michelangelo wrote while the basilica was under construction, documents now preserved in the Vatican archives. Rather than simply tracing his pen strokes, the team set out to recover the system underneath them — the proportions, rhythm and harmony of his writing — and to rebuild that logic as a contemporary serif family. It continues a collaboration that began in 2024, when the Vatican asked Microsoft to create a digital twin of the basilica. The finished family spans four styles — regular, italic, bold and bold italic — with Microsoft reporting more than two thousand glyphs. The lowercase forms draw on Michelangelo's correspondence, while the capitals look upward for inspiration: to the Roman lettering he designed for the basilica's dome, and to the rare inscription carried on the ribbon of his Pieta. Studiogusto's founder Stefano Calandro says the guiding decision was not to produce a calligraphic imitation of the artist's hand. Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, the basilica's archpriest, has described the project as a way of letting the writing of the Renaissance genius meet the digital age. The font is already available to download and is due to roll out across Word, PowerPoint and Excel before the end of the year.