Achi news desk-
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was the light of the day, unique in the world – at least in the eyes of the man who loved him. That devoted lover was Michelangelo, who Cavalieri described in these glowing words in a letter from 1532. If only a portrait of Tommaso had survived we could have seen his face, and the fifty something artist claimed in a poem that was so beautiful that he gave glance at him. paradise itself.
Not only did Michelangelo proclaim his love for this young upper-class citizen of Rome – who knew the pope and the prominent cardinals socially – in poetry and prose. He also gave Cavalieri some of the greatest paintings ever created. Up until this time, the mighty sculptor, painter and architect had used drawing as a tool to develop ideas: but the so-called “Presentation Drawings” for Tommaso aspire to be finished works of art . They star in the British Museum’s new exhibition of Michelangelo’s later graphic works, and demand a close look, as they are perhaps the most sublime expressions of gay love in art.
That may not be immediately apparent when you look at Michelangelo’s The Fall of Phaeton, from the BM’s own Michelangelo collection. It depicts a Greek myth, told by the Roman poet Ovid, about the overconfident youth Phaeton who has borrowed the flying chariot in which his father, the sun god, crosses the sky from dawn to dusk . He has lost control of the horses so Jupiter, to prevent his fiery chariot from burning the earth to a crisp, has struck him down. This is a sculptor’s drawing. You can feel the dead weight of the horses, their sheer mass, as they dive. Phaeton’s fairly naked body hangs loose. On the ground, already mourning the doomed youth, his sisters transform into poplar trees. There is also a man who mourns: Cycnus who, as Ovid says, loved him and was devastated by his death. In his grief, he transformed into a swan. And as a swan Michelangelo portrays this miserable love.
Other depictions that Cavalieri gave are much more obviously homoerotic to our eyes untrained in classical mythology. In The Punishment of Tityus, an eagle pecks at the naked form of a man. It is a scene of torment, but it is clear that Michelangelo takes pleasure in this pain: the eagle rests on Tityus’ head like a lover, and the naked man’s body tilts to ensure a clear view of his genitalia . Instead of a garish picture of open spells as other artists have depicted, Michelangelo feasts his and Tommaso’s eyes on a light and shadowy sensual encounter.
In another of these works, which survives in copies, Michelangelo depicted the god Jupiter in the form of an eagle to carry off Ganymede, a myth with inevitable “sodomic” implications. It appears to be an obvious wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Michelangelo imagines himself to be the predatory god carrying the naked Tommaso away in his claws. But there is a killer detail. Most Renaissance artists depicted Ganymede as a pre-adolescent. Michelangelo makes him a young man. He does that to assert the nobility of true love between men.
His declaration of such love is a triumphant end to a lifelong struggle. You can see it 20 years earlier in Dafydd’s right hand, its veins like cables as it tightens, fingers wrapped around a stone. David is full of contradictions and that hand is famously out of scale, inflated compared to the rest of him. Why? Well, if we have to rationalize, it symbolizes the importance of the stone that David is preparing to fire from his slingshot. But Salvador Dalí in his painting The Lugubrious Game offers another explanation. It depicts a male statue holding an extremely distant right hand like Dafydd’s, in a shameful confession of masturbation. If you stand under Michelangelo’s statue in the Accademia Gallery, Florence, David’s right hand actually looks Dalinian, close to his high groin.
Among its many meanings, David is partly about sex. Michelangelo works out, consciously and unconsciously, the nature of his desires. The bit about these desires bothered him so much that he got his biographer Ascanio Condivi to offer a philosophical explanation. Michelangelo loves the male body, acknowledges Condivi, but like the Greek sage Socrates his passion is unfettered.
Maybe it was, when he created David. Although he wrote many love poems, about women and men, and sumptuous chalk and ink drawings of naked male models, there is no record of him having a relationship with anyone before he suddenly declared his passion for Cavalieri. Dafydd’s surreal right hand can confess to the comfort of a lonely man.
The “Giant”, as he is nicknamed, also shows him working out his own ethics of love. Although it was a mortal sin and possibly a capital offence, encounters between males were far from unknown in the Renaissance. In Michelangelo’s city-state, Florence, the high level of recorded accusations suggests that many men had sex with other men before having families – this was not an identity so much as a rite of passage. And there was a strong social assumption that such sexual encounters involved an age difference – as when 24-year-old Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomizing a 17-year-old.
The biblical hero David was usually portrayed as an adolescent, yet Michelangelo made him an adult, anticipating the transformation he would give Ganymede as he declared his love for Cavalieri. There was nothing secret about these feelings. His poems were widely circulated in manuscript and even performed as songs. Cavalieri was so proud of the erotic drawings he showed them to the pope – and it made a good impression.
Michelangelo could risk this Renaissance coming out in part because artists were seen as special and different, their genius liberating them from conventional behavior. Since Michelangelo was supposed to be the greatest of them all, why shouldn’t he have a license?
He also had the cloak of Neoplatonism, which Condivi would later use to assert Michelangelo’s chastity. The Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino defined “Platonic Love” as a sublime desire that leads us from pleasure in someone’s shape (like Ed Sheeran’s song) to meditation on spiritual truth. Michelangelo’s poems to Cavalieri insist that he loves him this way. Yet they go far beyond using pop philosophy to cover forbidden impulses. Michelangelo is a great love poet. In these, his most passionate, complex verses, he truly tries to understand how physical desire relates to the more mysterious feeling we call “love”.
“It must have been your eyes,” she writes in a touchingly realistic image of falling for Tommaso. It wasn’t “your eyes”: we get the sense that he is still trying to understand how he fell so deeply in love. But it is surely love that helps him see heaven itself. Let the base gossip rabble all they like, he says in one poem: his emotion is pure. In a letter he puts the same belief in prose: “I will forget your name when I forget to eat food, except that your name means more than food because it is only feeding my body that feeds, but you feed a body and soul.”
Body and soul: because Michelangelo’s love is about their union. Yet this is not an easy synthesis. As much as he seeks sublime physical passion, it still exhausts him with fantasies and pain. He imagines Tommaso, in lines that play on the equestrian surname Cavalieri, as a powerful knight who binds him: “And if I need to be conquered, captive, to be in bliss, it is not surprising , naked and alone, I wait. prisoner of armored cavalry.”
This is not a passing image. Michelangelo set it in stone. While in love with Tommaso she carved, from 1532-4, his statue Victory. It portrays a young man who has conquered and subdued an older one. The naked victor bridges his older prisoner – bearded like Michelangelo – who humbly accepts his fate. At some point Michelangelo was defeated, perhaps by whispers and malignant interpretations of his behavior. Tommaso would marry, taking a wife from an established Roman elite family.
Whatever the physical basis of their relationship – and who hasn’t tried to understand how our feelings dart between mind and body? – it was love: like joy, like pain, like a glimpse of the Infinite. Through word and image Michelangelo made it universal. When Michelangelo died, aged 88, in 1564, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was at his bedside.
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