Michelangelo is one of the great queers. All his women are boys (for one), a point made by Ross King in Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, but for one standard source, see Howard Hibbard's Michelangelo (1974) (praised by another notable artistic faggot, Anthony Blunt), pp. 229-33, on Michelangelo's taste for men, quoting love letters and poems to men, including Tomamaso de' Cavalieri, with whom Hibbard says he fell violently in love. From a poem to Tommaso:
I see within your beautiful face, my Lord What in this life we can hardly attest Your soul already, still clothed in its flesh Repeatedly had risen with it to God [an obvious double entendre, more obvious in Italian: "con esso e gia pua volte ascensa a Dio"] The evil, foolish and invidious mob May point and charge others to its own taste And yet no less my faith, my honest wish My love and my keen longing leave me glad All beauty we see here must be likened to the merciful fountain whence we all derive More than anything else, by men with insight We have no other fruit, no other token Of Heaven on earth, one true to you in love May rise above to God, and make death sweet [e fa dolce la morte]
The death/orgasm analogy works in Italian as well as French and English.
Hibbard says that Michelangelo's homosexual love was chaste (Michelangelo says so too in the same poem) and that we have no evidence of a sexual life of any sort that he may have had. It's possible, although Hibbard was writing in a pre gay-lib 1974 when it was de regieur to deny such things.
However, Michelangelo was certainly a disciplined, driven, sublimated man -- in a society where, at least in theory, sodomy was punishable by burning at the stake. (However one of his friends ands associates was a painter nicknamed Sodoma, for obvious reasons, and Michelangelo, friend of the Pope, leading artist of the era, was way too important to burn at the stake. The other leading artist of the era, Leonardo, was queer too.)
Michelangelo was also a passionately and seriously religious man, a follower of the severe Florentine reformer Savonarola, whose likeness worked its way into the Sistene Chapel ceiling despite S having been hanged and burned at the stake for backing the wrong faction back home) whom today we would call very puritanical -- his was the original bonfire of the vanities -- and who certainly disapproved of homosexuality.
At the same time, Hibbard notes that people in his time took it for granted that Michelangelo was a pederast, attracted to young men, with whom he had sex, and I'd say that's evidence; Hibbard quotes an exchange in which Michelangelo says to the protector of a young apprentice who was worried that the artist would pursue the boy into bed, "I'll deny myself that consolation," which Hibbard thinks shows Michelangelo wasn't a pederast (Hibbard's word), but which is open to another interpretation and certainly shows where where his attractions lay.
Long and short: Michelangelo's art is intensely homoerotic; his expressed preferences and reputation were gay. His behavior is unknown.There is no suggestion that he ever had sexual relations with or passionate love for a woman.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Michelangelo could not have imagined
> > Robert Mapplethorpe, whatever their shared taste
> for
> > pretty boys. So the question is pointless.
> >
> >
>
> Just out of curiousity, how do we know what
> Michelangelo's sexual orientation was? Do we have
> correspondence between him and a lover or somesuch?
>
>
>
>
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