The Sterbas find that Michelangelo's personality and life course were significantly shaped by conflicts over his aggression toward his mother; she had placed him as a newborn with a wet-nurse in a stonemason's family and never took him back, dying when he was five years old. This thesis finds support in Michelangelo's renderings of the madonna who, with one notable exception, appears indifferent to the babe. In the exception, the madonna appears to be a peasant and there is a stone quarry in the background, suggesting that this madonna represents the wet-nurse. The Sterbas feel that white marble symbolized the maternal breast for Michelangelo, and they explain his savage attacks on the marble and his inhibition in beginning and completing sculptures as derivatives of these conflicts.