Me, Michelangelo: Of Men, Anatomy, and the Number (1)4

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475. From 1490 to 1492 Michelangelo attended Lorenzo de’ Medici’s school in Florence , Italy . At the mere age of 15 “he was influenced by many prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art, following the dominant Platonic view of that age, and even his feelings about sexuality. It was during this period that Michelangelo met literary personalities like Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino."

“After the death of Lorenzo on April 8, 1492 , for whom Michelangelo had become a kind of son, Michelangelo quit the Medici court. In the following months he produced a Wooden crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corps of the church’s Hospital.”

“Michelangelo finished in 1504 arguably his most famous work, the marble David (right). This masterwork established definitively his fame as sculptor for his extraordinary technical skill and the [strength] of his symbolic imagination.”

Michelangelo labored on the fresco of The Last Judgment (located on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel) from 1534 to October 1541 (below). “Once completed, the deptictions of nakedness in the papal chapel was considered obscene and sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored.” The piece was altered after Michelangelo’s death and restored in 1993.

“Michelangelo died at the age of 88 in his house next to the Forum of Trajan on February 18, 1564 .”

“Fundamental to Michelangelo’s art is his love of male beauty which attracted him both aesthetically and emotionally. Such feelings caused him great anguish, and he expressed the struggle between platonic ideals and carnal desire in his sculpture, drawing and his poetry, too, for among his other accomplishments Michelangelo was the great Italian poet of the 16^th century.”

“The sculptor loved a great many youths, many of whom posed for him and likewise slept with him…His greatest love was Tommaso dei Cavalieri (1516–1574), who was 16 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. In their first exchange of letters, January 1, 1533, Michelangelo declares: Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you... It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old... That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will." Cavalieri was open to the older man's affection: I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours. Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo till the very end, holding his hand as he drew his last breath.

“Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred sonnets and madrigals, constituting the largest sequence of poems composed by him. Though modern apologists hasten to assert the relationship was merely a Platonic affection, the sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to his young friend by a good fifty years.

“The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.”

All quotes taken from Wikipedia, 2005.