Did Michelangelo Love?

The elegant Leonardo da Vinci was walking down one of the streets of Florence with a sweet smile on his face, while on a bench on the other side of the street sat a group of men debating Dante. When one of them caught sight of Leonardo he said:

“Brothers, here is the man who can put an end to our dispute.”

At that very minute there appeared in the middle of the road a young man whose bearing showed him to be a man resentful of humanity and of the whole world. When Leonardo’s eyes fell on him he said: “Here is Michelangelo, my friends; you had better ask him to explain Dante to you.”

But Michelangelo paid them no attention and went on his way, saying: “Why don’t you explain it yourself, Leonardo!” — which was proof of how little he cared for people and how deeply he was withdrawn into himself. Michelangelo in those days was a young man at the beginning of his fame, while Leonardo was twenty-three years his senior and surpassed him in experience and renown, being among the foremost artists of that age; nor could Michelangelo have realized then that he would outstrip his colleague in glory and outshine him, in the near future, in greatness and fame. His father was governor of the town of Caprese; he had four brothers and no sisters, and his mother died when he was six years old. His father, though of noble stock, was poor, and often without work; he was harsh with his children, and how he would rage and storm whenever his son Michelangelo stubbornly declared his wish to become an artist, answering him that the Buonarroti were not made for such trades, but were made to be directors of banks and men of business. The quarrel between him and his father would end in insults and sometimes blows; yet none of that bent him or weakened his resolve, until his father was forced to take him by the hand, when he was thirteen years old, to the artist Ghirlandaio, to study art under him. When he left him there he said: “I wash my hands of this boy.”

This professional artist was then painting the walls of the church of Santa Maria Novella, and Michelangelo’s task was to mix the colors and copy certain models; and it soon appeared that the copies came out better than the originals, which stirred the master’s envy of his pupil, and he resolved to be rid of him. That was Michelangelo’s good fortune, for the artist Ghirlandaio sent him to old Bertoldo, who taught the young the art of carving; and through him Michelangelo came to know the world of learning and art, of music and poetry, beauty and brilliance: he came to know the things for which his ambitious artist’s soul had longed.

In the meantime he made the acquaintance of the famous Lorenzo de’ Medici, who admired his brilliance and quickness of mind, and invited him to the Medici palace, where he was allowed to sit at his table and play with his children. In that palace Michelangelo came to know beauty and wisdom, for there he met many of the philosophers, scholars, and artists who flocked to it from every part of the world; and in that palace, too, Michelangelo produced his first drawings. When Lorenzo the Magnificent died, political conditions in the city were troubled, so he left it for Bologna and began his work there by erecting a statue for the church; but he met with no success in that town, and returned to Florence, his birthplace, then left it for Rome to build his future in the Italian capital — twenty-one years having passed since the founding of the Vatican City.

Michelangelo reached Rome in 1496 and found it a city of music and crime, of culture and money, of dancing, festivals, poetry, painting, and the rest... Art there was without peer, and he said: “I have no friends, but I have no need of them, nor shall I have friends in the future.” Michelangelo was then twenty-three years of age. He submitted an application to make a statue of Christ the Lord and the Virgin for the church of Saint Peter, and among what he said in his application was this: “The statues I shall make will be of such beauty and splendor that no other artist can make anything more beautiful.” He won the competition, and made the statue of Christ and the Virgin which is counted today among the most magnificent statues in the world. This success of his left a far-reaching echo, and his fame reached the new Pope, Julius II, who was a lover of renown and wished to immortalize his memory in history by building himself a tomb the like of which the world had never seen before. He summoned Michelangelo and asked him: “How much will the building of this tomb cost?” When the artist gave him the figure he had imagined — an enormous one — the Pope said: “Let it be double what you have named.”

And on that they agreed.

But Michelangelo’s enviers among the artists soon put it into the Pope’s head that it was ill-omened to erect such a tomb while he was still in the prime of youth, and they induced him to change his mind and to stop Michelangelo from the work. The artist’s calamity was doubled when the Pope refused to pay him what he owed him for the work he had done, so that he was compelled to travel to Florence, grieving, despairing of erring humanity and of the Pope’s treatment of him. His pain so overwhelmed him that he imagined the whole world wanted to rob him or to steal the models of his drawings; he shut himself away in his house and refused to answer the invitation of the Pope, who sent for him several times; then he yielded to his entreaty and insistence, after the Pope had confessed that “an artist in his service like Michelangelo is a blessing and a boon to the Vatican.” He returned to Rome on condition that the Pope meet him halfway, and the Pope did so; and Michelangelo went back to work and produced what astonished the old world and still astonishes the new.

Among the masterpieces he produced at that time was his decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, on which he painted the figures of the twelve apostles. The paintings he made there will remain immortal for all time. When Pope Julius II died, he was entrusted with completing the tomb, and he spent twenty-three years at the work, in the course of which four popes died.

Writers are agreed that Michelangelo loved the beauty of the human body because he knew it through and through; but he did not carry these inclinations of his beyond that, to the satisfying of the sensual instinct in it, as did those who were incapable of appreciating the worth of beauty. Yet this did not prevent his enemies from making this conduct of his a pretext for attacking his worth and his dignity.

Condivi, who was Michelangelo’s contemporary and wrote about his life in 1553, says that he once heard him speak of love, and those who listened with him to that talk understood that his opinion of it did not differ from Plato’s opinion. Condivi did not know Plato’s view of love; but he — who knew Michelangelo thoroughly and was bound to him by close ties — had heard him express his views in pure and noble words, sufficient to suppress in any young man the baser urges and to curb in him the sensual leanings, and this made him understand the meaning of Platonism in love.

One of the modern authors who have chronicled Michelangelo’s life wrote, describing the age and the time in which the great artist returned to Rome: this was the age of surging spiritual impulses, when inclinations were drawn toward the youth of embodied manhood in the likes of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri; and from this there arose relationships which the historians have preferred to pass over in silence, prompted by the religious crisis that spends itself in beauty and in the love of it. This love of beauty and this passion for perfecting it appeared plainly in Michelangelo’s drawings, which later inspired in him his greatest poems of love.

This kind of love remained shrouded in concealment, the poets not daring to avow it openly in the verses that celebrated its charms. These shadows continued to surround it until 1878, when there was found among them one who possessed the boldness to dispel those shadows and to proclaim the secrets they had been hiding.

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was a refined young Roman who had devoted himself to art, and those who have written of him affirm that he was of a beauty without parallel. He met the great artist for the first time in 1532, and their friendship grew firm until, within two years, it reached its height and inspired Michelangelo’s finest poems and letters.

It appears that de’ Cavalieri greatly prized the old artist’s love for him, for he remained faithful to him until his last hours, at which he was himself present; nor were his concern for the old man and his care of him confined to his lifetime only, but continued after his death as well, for he devoted himself to executing his will with the same eagerness and warmth with which he had carried out his wishes while he was still alive.

It was Tommaso de’ Cavalieri who persuaded our artist to complete the wooden model he had made for the dome of the church of Saint Peter, and it was he who preserved the plans for the building of the Capitol after him; so it was ordained that their two names should go forever side by side — even had the young man’s beauty not, in truth, inspired some of the old man’s songs and poems.

This romantic friendship was the essential source of some of the artistic treasures counted among the most important of Michelangelo’s works... Vasari, one of the Italian historians, said that the artist lavished many precious gifts upon the beautiful youth, and among these gifts were drawings of dazzling beauty and a rare splendor without equal.

Nor was Michelangelo, at the same time, unmoved or cold toward the fair sex, for his spiritual bond with the nobly born beauty Vittoria Colonna, though it was a Platonic bond, became widely famous. This woman was forty-six years old, and Michelangelo sixty-three, when the ties of friendship between them grew firm; they spent most of their hours together talking of poetry and philosophy, and she was perhaps the only beautiful woman who showed Michelangelo more than admiration and esteem.

Vittoria was the wife of the Marquis of Pescara, and he treated her badly despite her love for him; nor was her friendship confined to Michelangelo, but extended to a number of the great artists and men of letters of that age. The letters and poems exchanged between Vittoria and Michelangelo are counted among the most precious and most exalted things in Italian literature.

The historians say that critical hours passed in Michelangelo’s life, but the most critical of them were those in which three dear ones died.

First — a boy of fifteen who bore on his face the marks of great promise, for whom a great future in the world of art was hoped, and whom Michelangelo loved as a father loves his son.

Second — the death of this boy’s uncle, who was Michelangelo’s financial adviser...

Third — the death of Vittoria Colonna... perhaps one of the severest of the blows that hastened his own death. Michelangelo stood before her body, contemplating it — he who had never once embraced her in her life, nor tried to — then took up her cold hand and kissed it. He later remarked to one of his close friends: “Nothing in my life has grieved me more than my sorrow that I did not dare to kiss her lips, even after her death.”

Michelangelo died at the age of eighty-nine, and until the last week of his life he was absorbed in painting and sculpture... When he felt his end drawing near he said, on his deathbed: “I do not regret the approach of my end; but I regret that I am dying at the very time when I have begun to understand the principles of art and to leap toward my true work.”