Michelangelo
From Philosopedia
Michelangelo Buonarroti (6 March 1475 - 18 February 1564)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni - sculptor, painter, poet - was born in Caprese, Italy. When young, he was placed in the care of Settignano stonemasons, and in 1488 he started three years of working in Florence with Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo received the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, and after his patron's death in 1492 spent three years in Bologna. Cardinal San Giogio, who bought his Cupid, summoned him to Rome where he stayed for four years before returning to Florence and sculpting the marble David. In 1503 Julius II summoned him back to Rome, commissioning him to design the pope's tomb but later ordering him to decorate the celing of the Sistine Chapel. From 1537 until his death, Michelangelo devoted himself to being the architect of St. Peter's.
As did Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo typified the ideal in art of “a new type - the universal man - the many-sided personality, delighting in every kind of this-earthly achievement” rather than the old type, the ascetic monk as ideal human. The Sistine Chapel ceiling and the homoerotic sculpture of David are his best-known works. The latter scandalized Australian authorities, who even in the 20th century sent police to seize coffee-table books containing photos of the nude statue.
His poems and sonnets were not published until 1960, having been altered for centuries to show that the love poems were addressed to women, not men (as was his original intent).
Although his Pieta and Moses earned high praise from church officials, he was aware that Deuteronomy IV: 16-18, specifically prohibits “the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth.” Both the Old Testament and the Qur’an are scathing about idolatry, and Michelangelo (along with other artists of his time) was aware that religious Jews could not even make or own statues or busts.
John Addington Symonds in his translation of Michelangelo's sonnets to Tommaso Cavalieri, returned the male pronouns that had been heterosexualized by previous editors into female pronouns.
Michelangelo never married, but according to The Advocate (19 August 1997) he likely was “intimate” with a Roman nobleman named Tommaso Cavalieri and, perhaps, with Pope Julius III. Cavalieri (c. 1509-1587) received the following letter from the artist, three decades his elder:
- 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 wrote back:
- 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.
John Addington Symonds, in The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1893), makes the case that the artist struggled between platonic ideals and carnal desire. He is said to have loved youths who posed for him, some like 16-year-old Cecchino del Bracci, whose death inspired him to write 48 funeral epigrams. Other youths, like Febbo di Poggio, sold some of his work. Gherardo Perini stole from him.
Church leaders were scandalized by Michelangelo's heresy, that of portraying nude figures that exposed themselves so shamefully. Such was for public baths and taverns, not for a papal chapel, they exclaimed.
According to art historian Giogro Vasari, Michelangelo's will was made on his deathbed, at which time he "gave himself up to God" after a "slow fever." In front of his physician and friends Tommaso Cavalieri and Daniele da Volterra, he said he left "his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his material possessions to his nearest relations." Little was left in his house, however, for he had burned much of his artistic material including, to the displeasure of Cosimo I, the designs for the facade of San Lorenz. Reportedly, he died holding hands with Cavalieri.
His body was deposited in a sarcophagus in the church of Santi Apostoli, but his nephew (Lionardo Buonarroti) a few days later took possession of his uncle's property and carried off the corpse, concealed in a bale. The body was then taken to Santa Croce, where Michelangelo had wanted to be buried.
- • Creation of Adam
- • David
