Sonnets of Michelangelo by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
The "Sonnets of Michelangelo" refers to the poetic works of the renowned Renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, who is primarily celebrated for his contributions to painting and sculpture. Despite his lesser-known status as a poet, modern scholars recognize him as a significant figure in Italian lyric poetry, particularly during the sixteenth century. His sonnets, which were not published until 1623—long after his death—reflect a complex interplay of themes, including platonic love, spiritual devotion, and artistic expression. Michelangelo’s poetry often showcases his unique style, characterized by unconventional structure and a deep emotional intensity that mirrors his sculptural techniques.
Many of his verses were inspired by his relationships, notably with Vittoria Colonna, a fellow poet, to whom he expressed both admiration and grief. His works also explore the divine aspect of love and the moral struggles associated with faith, as well as his reflections on art and aesthetics. The poems reveal a range of feelings, from the longing for spiritual connection to a critique of societal and political issues of his time. While his poetic talent was overshadowed by his artistic fame during his lifetime, the resurgence of interest in his poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries has led to a greater appreciation for his literary contributions, marking him as an important figure in the broader context of Renaissance literature.
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Sonnets of Michelangelo by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
First published:Rime di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1623 (English translation, 1878)
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
The fame of Michelangelo Buonarroti as a painter and a sculptor far outdistances his reputation as a poet. This is unfortunate, for while it is open to question whether Michelangelo could have ever developed into a poet of a stature equivalent to his stature in the plastic arts, his reputation as a poet is less than it should be. Modern critics have discovered that he is an important Renaissance Italian poet, and he is considered by many the best Italian lyric poet of the sixteenth century.
The reasons for the slow growth of Michelangelo’s poetic reputation are easy to identify. First, even in his own day, while his poetry was extravagantly praised by a circle of friends, it was Michelangelo’s painting and sculpture that drew the eyes of the world at large. Moreover, his poetry was not published until 1623, fifty-nine years after his death, and then only in an incomplete, much-edited, and censored edition. By that time the Renaissance style of writing was being replaced by the neoclassical style throughout Europe, and the poems did not attract major attention. It was not until the early nineteenth century, when the Romantics were rediscovering the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that complete and well-edited editions of the poetry began to appear. Only in the twentieth century were completely authoritative editions published.
Even Michelangelo never took his poetry seriously enough to collect, revise, or preserve the whole of it. While he considered himself a professional painter and sculptor, he, like almost every poet of the Renaissance, thought of himself as an amateur as a poet. Poetry, after all, was never much of a way to earn a living; in Michelangelo’s age poetry was valued as a social pastime and a gentleman’s skill. Even if a man did think of himself as a professional poet, it was bad form to act as if he did. This Renaissance attitude has given scholars much trouble, and only after much searching have they managed to locate in various places 343 separate poems and poetic fragments (and many variants) by Michelangelo. Most of these were composed after 1530.
Although the poetry is sometimes written in the traditional Petrarchan manner, and although the conventions of neo-Platonism are also important in the work, the best poems are characterized by Michelangelo’s unique style. The structure, syntax, and even the grammar are twisted and full of tension; the poems are often obscure, and the poet sometimes seems to pay scant attention to such relatively simple things as rhyme and metrical regularity. The overall impression of the verse, as critics like to point out, is as if Michelangelo in writing was struggling to shape his complex thoughts into hard, unmalleable language the way a sculptor struggles with marble or granite.
The poems fall into several categories. First in importance are the pieces written to Vittoria Colonna, either proclaiming Michelangelo’s platonic love for her (he met her when he was sixty-three) or lamenting her death, as in this sonnet:
So that I might at least be less unworthy,
Vittoria was herself a poet of some note and a patron of the arts, and she inspired several notable men of her day to the composition of verse. Generally speaking, there are three levels of love spoken of in Michelangelo’s poetry: human, fleshly love, which takes the Petrarchan convention; honest love, a transcendental emotion that takes the neo-Platonic convention; and good love, the spiritual love of God. Good love is the subject of the greater number of Michelangelo’s poems, but honest love is the dominant theme in the best of his love poems, most of which are written to Vittoria. Human love is a theme in these poems, too, but as an antagonist to honest love. In a typical poem to Vittoria, for example, the poet describes how honest love has come to him forbidding corrupt desire (human love) and raising him to the level of the spirit. This is a conventional, neo-Platonic theme, yet Michelangelo’s energetic expression of it reanimates the convention and produces a remarkably unconventional poetry:
I want to want, Lord, what I do not want,
The poems concerning the good love of God are next in importance after the poems to Vittoria. Michelangelo was seriously dedicated to the Christian ideal, and the religious poems are full of his deep, though often agonized love for Christ. Many of them are tortured, self-debasing confessions. Among the most frequent themes in these poems are fear of the judgment day, fear for salvation, the feeling of moral inadequacy, and prayer and supplication: “I live on my own death; if I see right,/ My life with an unhappy lot is happy;/ If ignorant how to live on death and worry,/ Enter this fire, where I’m destroyed and burnt.”
Tommaso Cavaliere was a young Roman aristocrat to whom Michelangelo was strongly attracted; a significant group of the poems are dedicated to the poet’s admiration and love of that youth. He saw in Tommaso a model of elegance and grace, a man with manners and a social style the opposite of that of Michelangelo himself. The main burden of this group is Michelangelo’s statement of admiration of the young man, and the poet’s offer of friendship:
I feel how a cold face that fire has lit
Michelangelo’s overtures were, apparently, coolly received. All in all, these poems speak of a platonic kind of love very similar to the kind of affection for a young man readers may be familiar with in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Much different are the forty-eight quatrains to Cecchino Bracci, who died at the age of fifteen in 1544. His uncle, Luigi del Riccio, requested of Michelangelo a tomb design and an epitaph for his nephew. Michelangelo had seen very little of Cecchino, and the moods of the poems represent those of the uncle, not of Michelangelo.
Naturally enough, a group of Michelangelo’s poems is concerned with art in general and some of his own works in particular. One interesting piece describes the physical difficulties he endured painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Two poems are written as speeches for two of the statues (Night and Day) that Michelangelo made for the tomb in Florence of the young Duke Giuliano de Medici. A number of the poems use metaphoric structures drawn from aspects of the practice of various arts, painting and sculpture in particular. Among these is Michelangelo’s perhaps best-known poem, the sonnet “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto” (“No conception the greatest artist can have”). Written between 1538 and 1544, the first four lines of this platonic love poem became famous immediately. Within a few years they were known in Spain and elsewhere, and they were translated into French by Phillipe Desportes, the only verses of Michelangelo translated into French before the nineteenth century. In these four lines is condensed Michelangelo’s idea of art. They can be roughly paraphrased as follows: “No conception the greatest artist can have is not imprisoned in the rough marble block; to break away the excess stone to reveal it is all the mind-guided hand can do.” This idea of sculpture (and by extension the other arts as well) as the achievement by skill of the artist’s intellectual conception was not entirely new, but Michelangelo’s unique and authoritative expression of it became, and still is, a touchstone for critics of his art.
Another group of poems is concerned with messages to acquaintances, patrons, and friends and with the pronouncement of opinion, praise, and condemnations. A friend is lectured on ingratitude; Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of artists, is praised for his preservation of the reputations of painters; Pope Julius II is angrily denounced; and the deaths of friends and relatives are eloquently regretted. Some of these poems are cautiously political and complain or condemn the actions of powerful contemporaries of the poet. The best-known of this class of poems is Michelangelo’s poem in which his statue Night, on the Florentine tomb of Duke Giuliano de Medici, speaks. Another poet, Giovanni Strozzi, had praised the statue, carved in the shape of a sleeping young woman. Strozzi suggests that since she is so much alive in art she be awakened. In reply, Michelangelo condemns the excesses of contemporary Medici politics in his native Florence. (Michelangelo, who to some extent identified himself with the exile Dante Alighieri, lived in Rome in self-imposed exile.) He has his statue answer that she would rather sleep than endure the vile corruption that she would witness around her if she were awakened.
The poems that do not fall into any one or more of these major groups cannot be easily classified. Michelangelo wrote in an unsystematic way and, apparently, as the spirit moved him. Many of his poems, for example, have been found jotted down on the back of prints or in the margins of letters or notebooks. It was only in his later years that he wrote consistent groups of poems. Among the unclassified poems are pieces on such various subjects as fire, night, the rustic life, death (he was already writing of his “approaching death” fifty years before he died), cities he had visited, and the manners and morals of his times. Not a few of this last type of poem are satirical burlesques, some full of the earthy language that has always upset censors and self-appointed guardians of public morality.
Bibliography
Brandes, Georg. Michelangelo: His Life, His Times, His Era. Translated with a foreword by Heinz Norden. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963. Highly readable interpretive biography by a great Danish scholar. Cites more than twenty poems, with an evaluation of Michelangelo as “in many ways . . . the most compelling poet Italy ever produced.” Demonstrates the self-mockery, the satire, even the buffo quality of some of the poetry.
Bull, George, ed. Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry. Poems translated by George Bull and Peter Porter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Accessible collection of writings by and about Michelangelo. Includes Condivi’s affectionate biography of his teacher, one of the earliest sources for Michelangelo’s life, along with selected translations of the master’s poems and letters, a fine introduction, and other study aids.
Clements, Robert J. Michelangelo’s Theory of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1961. An intense and thorough exploration of Michelangelo’s formative influences. Devotes attention to the relationship between his writing and other forms of artistic expression.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Poetry of Michelangelo. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Thorough analysis of the poetry in terms of its relation to Italian and broader European literary traditions. Documented discussion of the poetry as a reflection of the life of the artist. Best study in English of Michelangelo’s writing.
Pater, Walter. “The Poetry of Michelangelo.” In Michelangelo: Selected Readings, edited by William E. Wallace. New York: Garland, 1999. An evaluation of Michelangelo’s poetry by an eminent Victorian literary critic.
Ryan, Christopher. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Analyzes the chronological development of Michelangelo’s poetry, explaining the meaning and technique of his work. Cites quotations from his poetry in both Italian and English translation.