Michelangelo: The Pronouns They Painted Out
Michelangelo is the single greatest defining artist of the Renaissance. He painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, carved the David, and designed the dome of St Peter’s Basilica. He was also a prolific poet, writing over 300 sonnets and madrigals. In 1623, nearly 60 years after Michelangelo’s death, his grandnephew Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger published a collection of his great-uncle’s love poems. They were full of passion, and deeply personal. They’d also been tampered with.
Michelangelo’s grandnephew had systematically gone through the collection changing pronouns from masculine to feminine, so they would appear addressed to a woman and to mask their homoerotic desire. Whilst the original manuscripts survived and this deception would eventually come to light, for centuries, Michelangelo’s great love poetry would be read through a heterosexual lie.
This is one of the most interesting stories of queer erasure in literary history. Not because the erasure was unusual; this has been commonplace and widespread for centuries. But Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni is no marginal figure in world history. And yet his queerness was still deliberately rewritten.
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The Artist and his Aristocrat
In 1532, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was 57. He had become the most famous artist in Europe, having devoted decades to producing masterpieces that would come to define an age, and a civilisation itself. Then he met Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.
Tommaso was 23, a Roman aristocrat of exceptional beauty and cultivated taste. Meeting Tommaso had a seismic effect on Michelangelo. He wrote Tommaso poem after poem of ardent devotion: sonnets and madrigals declaring him the source of all beauty, the object of Michelangelo’s all-consuming desire, even the very reason for living itself. Michelangelo also gifted him extraordinary drawings, including mythological scenes of Ganymede, Tityos, and Phaeton, who art historians have long recognised are classical allegories of homoerotic desire.
I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;
A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
Which without motion moves every balance.
Unique spirit and my minds sole tendance,
Who is undying yet others seeks to kill,
I find one binds my heart, unbound his will,
And for who gladdens only I feel grievance.
How can it be, lord, that a face so lovely
Should work on mine in contrary fashion,
For who has no ill can hardly others harm?
To the glad life that’s taken from me,
It behaves, save you forbid it, like the sun,
It heats the world and yet itself’s not warm.~ I Feel As Lit By Fire, Michelangelo
The poems to Tommaso are not subtle, or coded. They describe desire in a language that directly borrows from Petrarch’s tradition of Italian love poetry, but Michelangelo repurposes it for an intense male-to-male devotion. Sonnet 94 describes the familiar paradox of desire: ice and flame co-existing, one’s strength reduced to a sense of helplessness. These are not abstract exercises of grammar and rhyme. They are passionate declarations from a man utterly consumed by his love for another man.
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The Grandnephew Wields the Knife
When Michelangelo’s grandnephew came to present his grand-uncle’s poems for publication, the gay desire was a problem. And so he rewrote Tommaso out of history, transforming the beloved from the young Roman nobleman Michelangelo had been in love with, into an anonymous woman.
The greatest artist of the Renaissance spent the last 30 years of his life in love with a man, yet the record was doctored to hide it.
This deception was only exposed in the 19th Century, when scholars compared the published versions in circulation with the original manuscripts. The manuscripts were unambiguous in their address to Tommaso. The love was between two men.
Even after this discovery, the art historical establishment was slow to engage with the truth. For much of the 20th Century, scholars would refer to Tommaso in that familiar language of deceit: he was a ‘patron’, ‘friend’, even a ‘protégé’. The drawings Michelangelo had gifted were closely analysed for their classical references, rather than their emotional content. The love poems were held up as neo-platonic exercises: abstractions about the ideal beauty, rather than expressions of Michelangelo’s lived desire. It was PR management by stuffy scholars uncomfortable with the implications that Michelangelo was consumed with love for another man.
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The Essential Reading
Michelangelo wrote over 300 sonnets and madrigals in his lifetime. Over 60 are addressed to men (around 50 to Tommaso) and this collection forms the first significant body of love poems in history from one man to another. Other poems, written later, are addressed to Vittoria Colonna, a noblewoman and poet whom Michelangelo shared a deep and intellectual friendship. But the contrast between the register across the two sets of poems pour water on any attempt to rewrite history. Michelangelo’s poems to Vittoria are spiritual, showing great devotion and restraint. His poems to Tommaso burn with passion and erotic desire.
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Why This Matters Today
Michelangelo’s story shines a spotlight on how widespread the systematic falsification of queer history has been throughout history. The artist appointed as chief architect to design St. Peter’s Basilica and its remarkable dome (the tallest in the world), was no footnote figure. The hands that painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, who carved the Pietà, also penned love poems to a man. But his family’s falsification of who he wrote them to stood for centuries. Generations of art lovers, scholars, and fellow queer people encountered Michelangelo through a sanitised lens that obscured the truth. When straight people question queer existence as a modern phenomenon, direct them to Michelangelo. Reclaiming the truth of his poems, in the words he chose, is an act of queer restoration.
It also restores to Michelangelo something his own family stole from his legacy: the right to love who he loved, in his own language, without apology. Five centuries later, we can now read his poems, shed of the deception and shame that Michelangelo certainly never felt.
