JMS Pearce
Hull, England

The poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) is often overlooked. In it we can discern that behind his sublime sculptures, painting, and architecture lurked a devout man disturbed by deep personal conflicts.

Michelangelo, born in Caprese, considered himself a Florentine, although for many years he lived in Rome.³ In the Church of Santo Spirito in Florence, the youthful Michelangelo dissected many cadavers, ardently studying the anatomy on which his sculpture and art were founded.^1,2,3 His lifelong friend Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), himself a famous Renaissance painter, architect, and biographer, commended him as “capable of a new kind of imitation that derived from the judgment given by Heaven.” Imitation is an odd choice of words; it perhaps suggests he tried to surpass the creation apparent in the real world by trying to copy or encompass higher divine powers.

Michelangelo wrote over 300 sonnets⁴ and madrigals. Many translations from his native Italian exist with inevitably different shades of meaning. He wrote in a style reminiscent of the Renaissance poets Dante and Petrarch.⁵ His principal themes were love, divine beauty, artistic struggle, and mortality. He embraced the Neoplatonist philosophy: that a human soul powered by love and ecstasy can reunite with an almighty God.⁶

One poem, differing from his usual content of spiritual and religious dilemmas, is a catalogue of complaints of the bodily discomforts he suffered while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel:

TO GIOVANNI DA PISTOJA.
ON THE PAINTING OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL.

I’ve grown a goitre by dwelling in this den—
  As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
  Or in what other land they hap to be—
  Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:
My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
  Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
  Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
  Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.
My loins into my paunch like levers grind:
  My buttock like a crupper bears my weight;
  My feet unguided wander to and fro…

Most of his verses reveal a complex, fervent, and deeply introspective man. They show his innermost troubled feelings about beauty, love, guilt, and what seems to be a devout quest for divine salvation: an interplay of vice and virtue. His verses were not intended for publication but distributed freely among his friends Luigi del Riccio, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Donato Giannotti, and Vittoria Colonna, whose poetry and zealous religious beliefs greatly influenced him.

Much of his poetry reflects his inner conflict between sensuous beauty, spiritual purity, and sexual feelings.⁷ He seeks divine grace and contrasts the vanity of earthly artistic creations with the eternal virtues of God. “The Lover and the Sculptor” shows his idea that truth and beauty were hidden, contained within the marble stone of his sculptures, the Platonic notion of a material world concealing a spiritual meaning:

The best of artists hath no thought to show
Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
Doth not include: to break the marble spell

His poetry is introspective, showing guilt about his homosexual but probably unrequited love for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman. Cavalieri, a married heterosexual man, certainly admired the older Michelangelo and received drawings and poems from him; but there is no evidence that he reciprocated Michelangelo’s passion. In “Beauty and the Artist,” he declares his passionate feelings:

 A heart of flaming sulphur, flesh of tow,
 Bones of dry wood, a soul without a guide
 To curb the fiery will, the ruffling pride
 Of fierce desires that from the passions flow

Cavalieri became uncomfortable with Michelangelo’s obsession with him and distanced himself. Michelangelo writes of his love for someone who is distant and aloof in the sonnet “Beauty’s Intolerable Splendour.” This conflict between flesh and spirit appears again in “Celestial Love”:

Not love but lawless impulse is desire:
That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair
Our friends on earth, fairer in death on high

The early critic John Addington Symonds praised the Platonic idealism of these verses.⁸ The sonnet “If One Chaste Love” pictures the perfect platonic love between two individuals, a unity and reciprocity; love transcends physicality and becomes eternal:

If the one loves the other and neither loves himself,
With one pleasure and one delight, to such a measure
That one and the other desire to reach a single end:
Thousands and thousands would not make a hundredth
Of such a knot of love, or of such a faith

More recent writers such as Christopher Ryan emphasized his homoerotic and psychological complexity.⁹

What moved Michelangelo to write poetry? Although he said that writing was not his profession, his poetry appears as an outlet for ideas that seemed to him too difficult to bear, too deep to express in his sculptures and painting. Saslow observed that his poetry could express ideas more overtly than visual art. Elizabeth Cropper noted that he elevated the object of his affection into a divine archetype, while simultaneously using that admiration to reflect his own spiritual shortcomings.¹⁰ This mirrors his idealized, Neoplatonic belief that physical beauty must contain a spiritual or moral value to be meaningful or lasting. His poems remind one of John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In a sonnet which he gave to Vittoria Colonna, he noted that neither painting nor sculpture would quiet the soul’s unrest. Another cause of his perplexity is seen in a poem “Joy May Kill” that tells of the paradoxical nature of joy and its potential for mortal pain.

He dedicated his sonnet “Dante” to Dante Alighieri, whose memory he worshipped. He extolled Dante’s moral courage and visionary isolation as well as sympathizing with his suffering when he had been sentenced to exile on political charges of corruption in 1302. (Dante’s Divine Comedy was completed in 1320.)

I speak of Dante, whose high work remains
  Unknown, unhonored by that thankless brood,
  Who only to just men deny their wage.
Were I but he! Born for like lingering pains,
  Against his exile coupled with his good
  I’d gladly change the world’s best heritage!

As the years advanced, Michelangelo became increasingly pious and devoted more time to poetry and architecture than to sculpture and painting. The influence of Vittoria Colonna is seen in his themes of piety, philosophical reflection, and in the struggle between flesh and spirit. In a 1554 sonnet, in melancholic mood, he despaired and denounced his art and creations as leading only to sadness. Paul Barolsky described it as a kind of spiritual exhaustion, where the artist finally turns away from the very gifts that once defined him.¹¹ The late sonnets bear the depressive burden of regret, a somber renunciation of earthly pursuits, and a turn more towards a contemplative spirituality than to a memento mori.

The fantasies I followed, now I see
Were full of error, how they cost my soul!
Let not death find me unprepared and vile.

These writings do not reflect his artistic creativity; more are they glimpses of an introspective spiritual man seeking redemption. Leo Steinberg has argued that Michelangelo’s religious fervor more than his aesthetics drove his most profound insights.¹² While his sculptures are sublime, his poems disclose a tormented spiritual fragility: the mental infirmities of a man searching for transcendence. So profound was his passion that his friend Benedetto Varchi remarked that his poetry was not like that of professional poets, but of one who wrote with his blood.

Michelangelo’s letters show that he suffered from gravel in his urine and then kidney stones for many years, which were treated by his close friend, the anatomist and surgeon Realdo Colombo. They describe a single, acute, painful foot at the age of eighty, and Raphael illustrated his knobby knees; he may have suffered from gout or osteoarthritis, or both. When he died aged eighty-eight in 1564 in Rome, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, who remained a friend, was at his bedside. He was buried at the Church of Saint Apostoli in Rome with a huge formal ceremony. When Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici heard of this, he honored him with a state funeral and a tomb in his native Florence. On his instruction, Leonardo Buonarroti (Michelangelo’s heir) stole the corpse, allegedly concealing it in a bale of hay, and took it back to Florence. A large and enormously costly tomb and monument designed by Vasari, worked from Carrara marble, and paid for by Cosimo I, was erected there in the Basilica of Santa Croce.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, of the ancient family of the Simoni, sculptor, painter, and architect, whose fame is known to all. Leonardo, his most loving nephew and most deserving of him, after his remains were transferred from Rome and laid in this, the greater tomb of his family, placed this here, encouraged by the Most Serene Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the year of salvation 1570. He lived 88 years, 10 months, and 15 days.

References

1. Vasari G. The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects 1550, 2^nd ed. 1568. Translated by J.C. and Peter Bondanella. OUP (Oxford World’s Classics), 1991.
2. Condivi A. The Life of Michelangelo 2nd ed. Trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl. Ed. Helmut Wohl. 1553. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn. State UP, 1999.
3. Pearce JMS. “The anatomy of Michelangelo (1475–1564).” Hektoen Int; Volume 11, Issue 2, Spring 2019. https://hekint.org/2018/04/11/anatomy-michelangelo-1475-1564/
4. The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella; Now for the First Time Translated into Rhymed English. Trans. John Addington Symonds. November 1, 2003. Project Gutenberg eBook #10314.
5. Bull G, Porter P, eds. Michelangelo, Life, Letters, and Poetry. Oxford UP, 1987.
6. Saslow JM. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. Yale UP, 1991.
7. Nims JF. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
8. Symonds JA. The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti. (1st ed. London 1893), New York: The Modern Library, 1928.
9. Ryan C. Michelangelo: The Poems, edited and translated. London: JM Dent, 1996.
10. Cropper E. “The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and Its Displacement in the History of Art.” In The Cambridge Companion to Michelangelo, edited by Michael Hirst. Cambridge UP, 2010.
11. Barolsky P. The Faun in the Garden: Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art. University Park, PA: Penn. State UP, 1994.
12. Steinberg, Leo. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response. Oxford UP, 1995.