Michelangelo Buonarroti
(March 6, 1475 - February 18, 1564) Italy
Architect, sculptor, painter and poet
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, born at Caprese, Tuscany, Italy; died in Rome. He was born of a wealthy Florentine family. His father Lodovico was resident magistrate in Caprese. Michelangelo was brought up in Florence and was placed in the care of a sculptor and his wife in Settignano where Lodovico owned a small farm and marble quarry.
In 1488, against his father's wishes, Michelangelo was apprenticed for three years to Domenico Ghirlandaio who recommended him to Lorenzo "Il Magnifico" de' Medici. Michelangelo entered Lorenzo's school (1490-2) where a collection of antiques had been gathered in the Boboli gardens. While living in Lorenzo's household Michelangelo came under the influence of many key thinkers of the time who affected his ideas about the purposes of art and his attitudes towards his own sexuality. During this period Michelangelo produced two reliefs: Battle of the Centaurs and Madonna of the Steps.
 After Lorenzo's death in 1492 his sucessor Piero de' Medici did not support Michelangelo and under the theocracy of Savonarola he fled to Bologna for three years. He returned to Florence in 1495. Cardinal San Giorgio bought his marble Cupid and summoned him to Rome in 1496. Michelangelo was influenced by Roman antiquity and produced the Bacchus and the Pietà.
After four years in Rome Michelangelo returned to Florence where he produced his marble David. He also painted the Holy Family of the Tribune and the Madonna.
In 1503 the new pope, Julius II, summoned Michelangelo back to Rome. He was commissioned to construct the pope's tomb, which he worked on for 40 years, but is was not completed because of other demands. Michelangelo was instructed to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12).
Julius II died in 1513 and Pope Leo X, of the Medici family, commissioned Michelangelo to rebuild the facade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence and to enrich it with sculptured figures. He reluctantly agreed but his artistic record for 1514 to 1522 is a blank and the scheme was given up. During 1528 to 1529 Michelangelo worked on the fortifications for Florence which was under siege.
Michelangelo was again commissioned to produce frescoes for the Sistine Chapel and he began The Last Judgement in 1537. In 1547 Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's to which he devoted himself until his death.
Michelangelo developed relationships with Tommaso de' Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Tommaso de' Cavalieri was 23 when the two men met in 1532. Michelangelo's corresponded with Vittoria Colonna in chaste and intellectual tones.
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 reclaimed Michelangelo's homoeroticism by translating his sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography and publishing it in 1893.
In his long and productive life he created paintings and sculptures unsurpassed both in physical size and strength and in emotional intensity. The Pietà now at St. Peter's Church in Rome; the David, in Florence; and most of all, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are the most celebrated artworks ever created.
He was known to be a lover of young boys. Boys thought to have been Michelangelo's lovers were: Cecchino dei Bracci, Gherardo Perini, Tommaso Cavalieri and Febo di Poggio, a young male prostitute. Michelangelo was in his late sixties when he met fifteen-year-old Bracci. Bracci died in 1544, at the age of sixteen. Michelangelo mourning the boys passing wrote about fifty poems, and designed the boys's tomb.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was 57 year-old when he met with Tommaso Cavalieri, on the Summer of 1532, in Rome. Handsome and with a sharp mind, Cavalieri was a little over 20 year-old, and was the son of an influential roman family. The passionate love of Michelangelo for Tommaso is clearly expressed in several sonnets where the artist talks both of his physical and spiritual love, and for him painted life-size portraits.
In Tommaso Cavalieri's beauty, Michelangelo found an inspirational source. He made drawings and paintings inspired by his beloved and gave them to him. Cavalieri was with him when he died at the age of 89.
Some of the most famous sculpture, painting and architecture in the world was created by Michelangelo, who spent most of his lengthy career creating monumental works of art for seven consecutive Popes. Regarded as the greatest living artist of his day, he remains one of the greatest artists of all time.
 What was Michelangelo like?
A hot-tempered guy, Michelangelo got his nose broken in a fistfight with another sculptor. He didn't wash, slept in his studio alongside his work, and though he became wealthy, ate and dressed like a pauper and worked like a dog. His homosexuality and religious fervor generated great conflict within him, and one self-portrait shows him as the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew (above right). When he was older, a much healthier self-portrait portrays him as Joseph of Aramathea (above left).
How do we know Michelangelo was gay?
When the contemporary sculptor Cellini was accused of "sodomy" by a rival, he retorted "Oh, fool, you're wrong [he lied!]: but would God I knew how to practice such a noble art, since one reads that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise." So knowing that, as educated people did back then, if a guy you'd just met made drawings like these for you, would you think he was gay? Jove in the form of an eagle seems to be copulating with Ganymede, right. The drawings, with legs spread wide and thighs for days, were for Tommaso De'Cavalieri, a handsome young nobleman.
Tommaso responded in kind, and the two men were friends for over thirty years.
In his poetry also, Michelangelo's passion for Cavalieri resounds:
If I must be defeated to be blessed,
Don't marvel that one, naked and alone,
should prove a prisoner of an armored knight.
The name Cavalieri of course means "knight". Michelangelo also wrote:
The love I speak of aspires to the heights;
woman is too dissimilar, and it ill becomes
a wise and manly heart to burn for her.
Michelangelo gave Cavalieri a drawing of the Fall of Phaeton; the erotic meaning of the story was well-known. What could be more erotic than a horse's crotch?
It's true that Michelangelo seems more inhibited about his sexuality than was Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo lived in Florence and Michelangelo in Rome, a generation later -- the time and place were not as permissive.
There can be no doubt Michelangelo fell erotically and romantically for Tommaso, even if some people don't think they expressed it physically. You don't have to get laid to be gay (but it helps!).
Some of Michelangelo works
 The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling - God gives the spark of life to his creature.
Cleopatra
 This is one of the few authenticated drawings of Michelangelo and was drawn for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a young artist that Michelangelo passionately loved. This is the only drawing, of what Michelangelo claimed many drawings presenting to Cavlieri, that we have left. The drawing is a study for a bust of Cleopatra and possibly represents the conflicted nature of Michelangelo's love for Cavalieri since Cleopatra was widely understood in the Renaissance as immasculating Caesar and later Marc Antony with her beauty.
This drawing belongs to the group of Michelangelo's works known as "presentation drawings". This definition, coined by Johannes Wilde, is applied to drawings made by the artist not for the purposes of design or study, but as gifts. They are extremely elaborate images, with subjects that are complex, always profane and often far from easy tointerpret. And in fact the Cleopatra was executed for Tommaso Cavalieri, the young Roman whom Michelangelo met in 1532 and who was the recipient of the largest number and most extraordinary of these drawings. In 1562, when Michelangelo was still alive, Tommaso Cavalieri was obliged to present the work to Duke Cosimo I dei Medici, though he accompanied the gift with a letter in which he said that relinquishing the drawing had caused him no less suffering than the loss of a child. In fact, as the time approached to give up the work, he decided to have a copy made by an "artist friend of his", as we are informed by a letter dated January 24, 1562, from Cosimo I's ambassador to the papal court, Averardo Serristori. In 1614, however, Cosimo II had the Cleopatra sent to Casa Buonarroti. Ever since the time, in August 1988, when restoration work on the sheet revealed the existence of another drawing by Michelangelo on the verso, it has aroused considerable interest.
The removal of a layer of priming during the restoration brought to light another picture of Cleopatra, identical in composition and with the same feature of the hair turning into a serpent. But, in comparison with the noble and polished classicism of the drawing on the recto, it is much more immediate and there is an expression of anguish on Cleopatra's face. Alongside the ancient Egyptian queen, there is a barely sketched profile of an old man. Michelangelo's works have been copied and translated into other media by many artist down the centuries: the fact there are no copies of this verso leads us to assume that the drawing was covered up very early on.
The Last Judgement: Center Section Detail
 Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Paul III to paint the wall of the Sistine Chapel in 1536. Twenty years earlier he had been commissioned by Julius II to paint the ceiling of the chapel, which Michelangelo considered the least important part of the chapel. This work, however, was so well-received that Paul III was anxious for him to do the central wall. This final frescoe, The Last Judgement, painted between 1536 and 1541, represents Christ in his glory judging the souls of the dead. Located in the center of the wall, Christ is a figure of both stability and motion as the souls rise to the ceiling or fall to the floor and damnation. This painting was executed at the height of the Reformation and Paul III's Counter-Reformation. All the issues circulating about the reform of the church as well as the confusion engendered by the Reformation are represented in this painting. There is, despite the confusion of human souls, a stable center to the spiritual universe represented in the painting. It seems that the fave of the Crist is a portrait of Tomaso Cavalieri...
 Study of a Nude Man
This is a contested drawing that some consider by Michelangelo and others consider as by another artist. As a nude figure, the erotics are fairly low key and the picture seems largely a study in motion and geometry. Like much of Michelangelo's work, this drawing of a male nude in part is about finding a language for male-male love and desire. The erotics of the drawing is balanced by the reaching out of the arm and hand, a symbol of the desire for God in Neoplatonism.
|
