Michelangelo Buonarotti & Tommaso de' Cavalieri

Michelangelo Buonarroti is one of the most celebrated sculptors and artists of the Renaissance. For his sculptures, the quality of the marble was crucial. He selected blocks himself, examining the colour, veining and flaws in the stone, and repeatedly spent time in the marble quarries of Carrara and Pietrasanta. There he gave precise instructions on the size, shape and extraction of the blocks.

From 1532 onwards, Michelangelo was bound by a close emotional relationship to the much younger Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Contemporaries praised Cavalieri’s beauty, education and noble bearing. Michelangelo was deeply impressed by him and gave him highly finished drawings, including mythological sheets such as The Fall of Phaeton and Tityus. He also dedicated numerous sonnets to Cavalieri, in which admiration and longing are unmistakable. The poems are among the best-known testimonies to same-sex love in the Renaissance. For Michelangelo, physical beauty, spiritual love and religious thought were closely intertwined.

Whether the relationship was physical cannot be proven. Later editors, however, intervened in the transmission of the poems: when Michelangelo’s poetry was printed in 1623, male references were partly softened or recast as female. The relationship lasted for decades. Cavalieri was also present at Michelangelo’s deathbed in 1564.