See http://www.glbtq.com/literature/michelangelo, (now under construction)

Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.

The son of a magistrate, Michelangelo was born in Caprese, a village near Florence. At the age of thirteen, he became an apprentice in the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio's workshop, where his precocious talent was recognized almost immediately.

Soon he attracted the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici ("the Magnificent"), the powerful Florentine patron, who invited the promising young man into the elite inner sanctum of the Medici household, which was then at the center of a flourishing artistic circle. It was there that Michelangelo was exposed to the ideas of the outstanding artists, intellectuals, and noblemen of his day, a group of whom would regularly gather for meals and conversation.

Michelangelo's talents were nurtured at the Medici Court, where he was allowed to study the fine collection of statuary in the family's renowned garden, a virtual museum of antiquities, and from this time forward he began to produce the works of art that have made him the most celebrated figure of the Italian Renaissance in the eyes of popular culture.

The statue of David, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, and the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral are among the many masterpieces of his long career that are rightly acknowledged as essential landmarks in the history of art, and they have elicited strong responses from the moment of their first exhibition to the present day.

Michelangelo's poetry has not consistently elicited the same enthusiasm even though the artist spent considerable time creating over three hundred poems in the Italian vernacular over a period spanning six decades (ca 1501-1560, with the vast majority of the extant verse written ca 1530-1550).

The Reputation of Michelangelo's Poetry

Although some of his contemporaries did commend his poetic gifts, modern scholars have been slow to grant Michelangelo status as an eminent literary figure. The poetry has sometimes been trivialized as a second-class adjunct to the artwork, useful primarily for explaining the imagery of the paintings, statues, and drawings.

Perhaps the most judicious view is that the poetry and art are worthy of mutual respect, and that, though not attaining the artwork's sustained level of stellar achievement, the verse contains moments of indisputable genius. At any rate, both the verbal and visual modes were commonly viewed as interrelated in Renaissance aesthetic theory, and profoundly aware of the philosophical rapprochement between poetry and the plastic arts, Michelangelo himself paid both literary and artistic homage to select people whom he loved dearly.

Michelangelo's Inspiration: Tommaso Cavalieri

Both verbal and visual craftsmanship are brilliantly combined in the series of poems and drawings intended for Tommaso Cavalieri, a handsome Roman aristocrat. At the age of fifty-seven, Michelangelo became smitten in 1532 with the "infinitely lovely" Cavalieri, who at the age of twenty-three seemed to embody all the ideals of masculine beauty that the aging artist had searched for throughout his career.

As a result, we are fortunate to have a trove of artistic evidence that seems to record, under the guise of subtly encoded symbolism, the emotions that Michelangelo felt for the cultivated young man.

Ganymede and the Imagery of Flight

Of particular interest to gay studies has been the imagery of flight that permeates various items created (or, in some cases, assumed to be created) for Cavalieri. The drawing of Ganymede, which we are told was expressly made for the beloved Tommaso, portrays the nude Trojan prince Ganymede being swept aloft by a giant bird that is actually Jupiter in disguise.

The iconography of the drawing can be read as an allegory of Michelangelo's own conflicted sexual responsiveness to the youthful Cavalieri.

On the one hand, Ganymede's abduction by Jupiter in the form of a giant bird was frequently explicated as an archetypal myth of the soul's rapt transportation to the heavenly spheres, a transcendent aerial journey away from the carnality of earthly desires.

On the other hand, Ganymede, a young man of exceptional beauty, and the metamorphosed Jupiter could also be interpreted as flying into sensual rapture, entering the highest realm of unabashed erotic ecstasy with one another.

Both readings of the Ganymede myth--spiritual versus sexual flight--appear to be present in an uneasy, irreconcilable alliance that seems intentional on Michelangelo's part. The fact that this homoerotically charged drawing was made specifically for Cavalieri, to whom Michelangelo wrote passionately suggestive letters, implies that the artist was trying to convey a message of ardent desire that included a physical, as well as a metaphysical, aspect.

The tensions of seductive sensuousness versus Platonic idealism that permeate the drawing can also be found in the allusions to flight in the poetry composed for Cavalieri during this period (the early to mid-1530s).

For example, in "Veggio co' bei vostr' occhi" ("I see with your beautiful eyes"), Michelangelo the poet celebrates Cavalieri as a source of inspiration and airborne rapture: "Though I am featherless, I take flight upon your wings, . . . and my words begin to breathe upon your breath." The bristling energies of homoeroticism are impossible to erase from the ecstatic images of flight in both verbal and visual contexts.

The Imagery of Earthbound Captivity and Servitude

Michelangelo's images of earthbound captivity and servitude bristle with homoerotic energies as well. Two of his sonnets, "D'altrui pietoso" and "A che piu debb' io" (nicknamed, respectively, "The Silkworm" and "Love's Lordship" by the Victorian translator John Addington Symonds), are among the greatest lyrics of same-sex desire in world literature.

These poems, memorable for their evocation of masochistic fetishism and grotesque self-loathing, reinvigorate what had become, during the Cinquecento, the rather moribund imitative tradition of the courtly love lyric. Michelangelo takes the commonplaces of hyperbolic romantic discourse and infuses them with the dramatic dynamism of his own repressed desires for the male body.

In "The Silkworm," the poetic speaker, as usual a thinly veiled authorial mask for Michelangelo himself, longs for his skin to be flayed, thus becoming the raw material that will be transformed into garments to clothe the exquisite body of the fair beloved (probably Cavalieri):

Kind to the world, but to itself unkind,
   A worm is born, that dying noiselessly
   Despoils itself to clothe fair limbs, and be
   In its true worth by death alone divined.
Would I might die thus for my lord to find
   Raiment in my outworn mortality:
   That, changing like the snake, I might be free
   To cast off flesh wherein I dwell confined!
Oh, were it mine, that shaggy fleece that stays,
   Woven and wrought into a vestment fair,
   Around his breast so beauteous in such bliss!
All through the day he'd clasp me! Would I were
   The shoes that bear his burden; when the ways
   Were wet with rain, his feet I then should kiss!

(adapted from Symonds's translation)

The image of being flayed alive is thematically relevant to Michelangelo's self-portrait as the flayed martyr St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment fresco.

In both the poem (1535) and the fresco (1534-1541), Michelangelo portrays himself as an annihilated piece of flesh that yearns to be transmogrified into a different form in order to accord with the superior status of the male beloved: The Christ of the Last Judgment, awe-inspiring as His wrath is, holds out the blissful possibility of eternal life in a state of grace, while Cavalieri in the sonnet offers a vaguely similar possibility of a fanciful kind of life after death.

The poem, however, foregrounds the idea of physical proximity and sensual infatuation that, in effect, undermines its own hypothetical denials of the living flesh. The fantasy of corporeal oneness with the beloved seems foremost in the mind of the poem's speaker.

In the cosmos of Michelangelo's poetry, the fascination with male physical splendor, despite superficial disclaimers to the contrary, is almost always imbued with the urgency of erotic appetite and sensual craving.

In "Love's Lordship," sensual craving for the sumptuous Cavalieri causes Michelangelo, as the poem's speaker, to become a slave of passion:

Why should I seek to ease intense desire
   With still more tears and windy words of grief,
   When heaven, or late or soon, sends no relief
   To souls whom love hath robed around with fire?
Why need my aching heart to death aspire,
   When all must die? Nay, death beyond belief
   Unto these eyes would be both sweet and brief,
   Since in my sum of woes all joys expire!
Therefore because I cannot shun the blow
   I rather seek, say who must rule my breast,
   Gliding between his gladness and his woe?
If only chains and bands can make me blest,
   No marvel if alone and nude I go
   An armed Cavalier's captive and slave confessed.

(adapted from Symonds's translation)

Michelangelo, like his great literary forefathers Dante and Petrarch, makes suffering supremely artful. And yet one feels that the mournful grief represented here is a source of delight, insofar as the naked speaker's imprisonment by the armed "cavalier," a deliberate pun on the name Cavalieri, can ultimately bring about felicity.

Giving in to the bondage of total obsession with Tommaso, for whom Michelangelo created one of the few portrait drawings of his long artistic career, is a paradoxical kind of erotic liberation, a strange kind of permission to drop sexual inhibitions, on an imaginative level, by having the beloved enforce restrictions.

In the late 1530s and 1540s, Michelangelo began to turn his attention away from Tommaso Cavalieri to Vittoria Colonna, a distinguished poet and woman of letters in her own right. Although Cavalieri and Michelangelo remained friends, the young man went on to marry and apparently did not reciprocate the artist's libidinal overtures.

Michelangelo, by contrast, never married, and his exercises in heteroerotic Petrarchan verse seldom attain the fervent amorous immediacy that characterizes his homoerotic lyrics.

The Poetry Dedicated to Other Attractive Men

The poetry dedicated to attractive men--not only Cavalieri, but also Febo di Poggio, Cecchino Bracci, and other figures who are either fictional or difficult to identify with precision--is a testament to the artist's intense fascination with male beauty, a fascination that is overwhelmingly dominant in the artwork.

And yet no documentation indicates beyond reasonable doubt that Michelangelo ever physically consummated a relationship with anyone. The closest relationship that he ever had with a woman was with Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, a devout widow who seemed to fulfill his need for a nonsexualized friendship with a female of remarkable talent and theological conviction.

The Final Phase of Michelangelo's Poetic Career

In the final phase of Michelangelo's poetic career (ca 1540-1560), the embodiment of male perfection is typically represented as having passed into the afterlife or in meditative religious contexts.

In addition to a small group of elegiac lamentations written for deceased friends, the artist writes an extraordinary series of fifty funerary poems for the ill-fated Cecchino Bracci, a handsome adolescent who died prematurely at the age of fifteen, and a moving series of lyric prayers to Christ, the Savior who, according to Christian belief, sacrificed His perfect body for the salvation of humankind.

Hence, the poetry of male beauty and masculine belovedness becomes increasingly preoccupied with death, spiritual mysticism, divine judgment, and redemption. In what may be his last poem, "Non piu per altro" ("No longer by any other means"), Michelangelo invokes Christ's blood as the healer of "innumerable sins and human urges," and the reader seems asked to ponder exactly how homoerotic desire figures into the artist's own life-long struggle with the very human urges of "love, that passion dangerous and vain."

Editorial Censorship of the Poems and Their Eventual Recovery

In the first printed edition of the poetry, which was not published until almost sixty years after the author's death, the editor was obviously troubled by the haunting homoerotic inflections of Michelangelo's verse. Therefore, in the original volume of the collected poems (1623), which was edited by the artist's grandnephew "Michelangelo the Younger," genders were switched from male to female in some instances in order to be more palatable to orthodox tastes.

This "corrected" version of Michelangelo's manuscripts was the standard text until the unexpurgated versions of the poetic canon began to appear in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Several important editions have appeared since World War II, improving scholarly comprehension of textual issues and making Michelangelo's literary efforts available to a broader audience. The relatively recent edition by James Saslow prints the Italian texts along with literal English translations that are helpful to students whose Italian is in need of assistance.

Conclusion

With the rise of lesbian and gay studies in the 1980s and l990s, it seems certain that Michelangelo's poetic canon will continue to provoke interest and remain a point of contention for debates about how the self was sexually constructed in Renaissance discourse.

If a gay male author is defined loosely as someone whose erotic drives and fantasies are directed principally toward members of his own sex, then Michelangelo should be deemed an appropriate figure to be understood as participating in the evolution of the gay literary tradition. The poems--perhaps our most meaningful evidence for Michelangelo's construction of sexual selfhood--teem with homoerotic dynamism and an attendant ethic of sublimation.

Although Michelangelo wrote in a variety of verse forms and literary modes, the sonnets that address appealing male beloveds are, at their best, his most intriguing contribution to the literary history of same-sex desire. The poet's lack of formal education and training in classical languages did not impede his ability to write verse that surpassed that of many of his more learned contemporaries.

Innovative, obscure, elliptical, at times metrically and ideologically unorthodox--Michelangelo's poetic legacy deserves the full attention of the academy. Indeed, not until Shakespeare would another sonneteer represent same-sex desire with such sensuous complexity, emotional resonance, and linguistic artfulness.