The Ugly Renaissance (19 page)

So distinct were legal and moral norms from the sexual realities that the Florentine
Office of the Night seems to have concentrated its efforts more on policing
rape and male
prostitution than on exterminating homosexual acts, for which it appears to have indulged a pragmatic form of toleration. In the complex and intellectually charged world of Florentine homosexuality, men who professed fidelity to each other were occasionally regarded as “married” by the Office of the Night, especially if they had sworn an oath to that effect over a Bible in church.
There is some evidence that same-sex unions even received a blessing in liturgical ceremonies in some places in central Italy, and there is reason to believe that similar practices may have been found in Florence.

There was, in fact, every reason not merely to tolerate but even to encourage homosexual relationships of this variety. Settled partnerships were often applauded by families who recognized that a homosexual “marriage” could be as socially advantageous as its heterosexual equivalent. Provided that the match was astutely made, it could bring with it influence, protection, and wealth. Friends frequently accepted gay marriages, and while there was no subculture as such, the formation of homosexual networks acted as a powerful vehicle for men to further each other’s interests in the world of work and business.

Despite Michelangelo’s apparent disregard for sex during the period 1501–4, the atmosphere of Florence would have been charged with sexual energy. The sparks flew in every direction. Regardless of the strictures of law and morality, people were at it all the time and from a remarkably young age. Frustrated young men, lusty young girls, bored housewives, and wandering husbands seem almost never to have passed up an opportunity to amuse themselves with others or to indulge the rich variety of the city’s brothels. So, too, same-sex relationships between men were—if anything—every bit as prevalent and flexible as in today’s
world. And in the cramped world of Renaissance housing, nothing—but nothing—was ever private.

T
HE
W
ORKSHOP OF THE
W
ORLD

And so the drama of everyday life went on. The
workshop—the nexus of Michelangelo’s life—was the epicenter of artistic production, but it was also a nodal point for social life, the setting for all of the cares and concerns that dominated ordinary existence. It was, in a sense, not so much a workshop as the workshop of the world of the Renaissance artist. Looking at the comings and goings in an average day, we can see that art was not just a matter of high-minded, abstract creativity but an enterprise overshadowed by the worries of home life, the pleasures of friendship, the troubles of business, the agonies of ill health, and the conflicting impulses of desire. As Michelangelo’s workshop shows, Renaissance art was much uglier, but also much more ordinary and human, than familiar conceptions of the period might suggest.

5

M
ICHELANGELO IN
L
OVE

I
N THE AUTUMN
of 1532, Michelangelo was working at his house at Macel de’ Corvi
in
Rome. Since finishing the
David
twenty-eight years earlier, he had experienced a sequence of unremitting artistic triumphs, and after he had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512, the never-ending series of commissions that came his way had obliged him to shuttle continually between his native Florence and the Eternal City. It had, however, been an old project that had brought him back to Rome in the autumn of that year. Briefly abandoning his work on the Florentine church of San Lorenzo, he had traveled south to renegotiate his contract for the design of
Pope Julius II’s
tomb, an enterprise on which he had been engaged since 1505 but which was still nowhere near completion.

It was while Michelangelo was tinkering with his designs for the tomb one afternoon that an otherwise obscure sculptor named
Pier Antonio Cecchini came to visit. An old and trusted friend, Pier Antonio had got Michelangelo’s Roman house ready for him and often popped in for a chat. Although little is known about his life, he seems to have been a good fellow, and Michelangelo would have greeted his arrival that day with pleasure. But as Pier Antonio stepped across the threshold, Michelangelo would have seen that an otherwise enjoyable, if conventional, distraction was becoming an unforeseen delight.

In a break with habit, it seems that Pier Antonio had not come alone. He had brought with him a young friend named
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. It was perhaps only natural for Pier Antonio to have brought the two together. Given that Tommaso’s family lived not far away in what is now the Largo Argentina, they were virtually neighbors. What was more,
the Cavalieri were noted collectors of classical sculpture, and Tommaso was particularly fond of art.

But Tommaso de’ Cavalieri himself was also no ordinary young
nobleman. At barely twenty years old, he was a true Renaissance heartthrob. As the portrait Michelangelo later drew of him shows, he possessed a simple, unaffected beauty. His skin was clear, his eyes were large and honest, and his features were so delicate as to be almost feminine. Although the scion of a noble house, he had none of the hauteur that might have been expected, and his apparent modesty was set off by his fashionable yet understated dress. What was more, he was certainly highly cultured.
Having received the thorough humanistic education that befitted his station, he could discourse on poetry, philosophy, and painting with sensitivity, sophistication, and grace.

What exactly passed between the two men at their first meeting is not known, but it is clear that the fifty-seven-year-old Michelangelo was immediately besotted with Tommaso. For all his creative brilliance, the artist later confessed that he could think of nothing to compare to Tommaso’s “loveliness,” and despite the disparity in their ages his heart was filled with an all-consuming passion.

It was the beginning of an intense, emotionally charged relationship that would dominate Michelangelo’s thoughts until the end of his life. But it was not without its difficulties. At times during the next thirty-two years, even the thought of the younger man could give him the most intense pleasure. Yet at the same time, it could also cause him great pain. Although he gave his heart and soul to Tommaso, Michelangelo’s extravagant feelings were not always reciprocated in quite the same fashion. As early as 1533,
he remarked upon Tommaso’s “fear,” and the young man’s occasional coldness thereafter continued to torture him. Now and again, he even started to question whether such love—or was it lust?—was not wrong.

Although Tommaso and Michelangelo spent a great deal of time together over the next three decades, their relationship was played out principally through the arts of which the older man was a master. Not long after their first meeting, they began a tender and affectionate correspondence, and a constant stream of letters coursing with barely concealed emotion passed between them. Verse came no less easily to Michelangelo, and love “
would provoke a poetic outpouring that was unprecedented.” Art, too, became a medium for his passion. By the end of 1532, Michelangelo had already sent Tommaso a gift of two exquisitely composed drawings and later followed this with two further compositions on classical themes.

These poems and gift drawings are a powerful evocation of the cultural and intellectual world in which his feelings were forged. Confronted with the delicacy of Michelangelo’s works, it is difficult not to be struck by the extent to which he adapted patterns of “Renaissance” thought to his own purposes, and by the degree to which artistic production worked in dialogue with the humanistic enthusiasm not only for reviving the spirit of classical literature but also for “reliving” the culture of antiquity.

But at the same time, Michelangelo’s poems and gift drawings also show that the cultural and intellectual developments that characterized the period were shaped by the realities of personal experience and everyday life. Instead of being a product of high-minded ideals or attractive little parlor games, the verses and drawings that Michelangelo sent to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri were outpourings of his very soul and used ancient and contemporary tropes not only as a means of understanding his conflicted feelings but also as a vocabulary with which to give voice to his
love, his passion, and his uncertainties.

As such, the ins and outs of Michelangelo’s relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri offer an ideal opportunity to examine the intellectual world of the Renaissance artist and to reevaluate the familiar tendency to divorce literary and artistic production from more “human” concerns. Although love and
sex were certainly not the be-all and end-all of Renaissance thought, they were a node around which literature, art, and philosophy worked in tandem with grim and gritty realities in a manner emblematic of the broader interaction between the literary and artistic innovations of the age and the hopes and fears of real people. And insofar as Michelangelo not only drew on a rich and varied cultural heritage but also adapted the experiences of other Renaissance men and women to his own feelings—experimenting always with their vision of love and sex and playing the parts of those who had gone before him in an attempt to find what best fitted his own happy, tortured feelings—his works offer a lens through which to view the dynamics that linked the often sordid details of everyday existence to the highest realms of culture.

By unpicking the various “acts” in the drama of Michelangelo’s relationship with Tommaso, we can see not only the different phases in the evolution of the intellectual world of the Renaissance artist but also the lives—and the experiences of love and sex—that shaped that world.
Linking literary and artistic production with the “real” world of conflicting emotions will reveal a world that is far removed from our familiar conceptions of the period, a world born not of the purely aesthetic concerns of otherworldly beings removed from the joys and sorrows of ordinary people, but among unrequited passions, broken hearts,
sexual obsessions, and suffering.

A
CT 1
: I
DEALIZATION

Throughout the early months of their relationship, Michelangelo was prone to idealizing Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. As he saw it, he had lost his heart not to just another person but to a living embodiment of a physical, moral, and cultural ideal. Indeed, as Michelangelo wrote in an early poem, the young man’s beauty had been “made in heaven to give us proof of work divine.” In the face of such perfection, he imagined himself to be utterly powerless. In his verse, he spoke of a personified
Love that held him in its iron grip and that—having revealed the ideal—appeared in the guise of a domineering master who had enslaved him irrespective of his will.

This image of the beloved as the embodiment of an ideal beauty and virtue and of Love as a hard and uncompromising captor points toward the very origins of the Renaissance conception of love and sex. Here, there can be little doubt that Michelangelo was playing the part of Dante.

As early as the 1320s,
Dante Alighieri had been celebrated for having “
brought back dead poetry from the darkness to the light,” and like many of his contemporaries Michelangelo had grown up in an atmosphere in which Dante was celebrated as an incomparable genius, worthy of comparison with the great poets of antiquity.
Having studied the
Commedia
as a schoolboy, Michelangelo was trained to view Dante’s work as the very model of Italian vernacular poetry. But his was no mere technical admiration. The enthusiasm he had first felt on delving into Dante’s works was fueled by his introduction to the circle of humanists who surrounded Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence and by his acquaintance with
Cristoforo Landino’s highly influential commentary on the
Commedia
.
In later years, he would deepen his knowledge by reading Dante with
Giovanfrancesco Aldovrandi in Bologna and found himself filled with adoration for the treasures he continued to discover. As he was
later to observe, Dante was a “
radiant star” whose “splendour burned too brightly for our dim eyes.”
Indeed, for Michelangelo, as for
Boccaccio and earlier poets, Dante was sufficiently divine for his death to be regarded as a “return” to the heavens from which his genius sprang.

But although Dante offered Michelangelo a natural—even obvious—archetype for the exploration of an all-consuming desire for a semidivine ideal in verse, this is not to say that Dante’s contribution to Renaissance conceptions of love and death could be viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. Quite the reverse. Dante’s experience of love was born of an unrequited passion and years of painful, agonized frustration.

Dante’s story begins on May 1, 1274, when the poet was just shy of his ninth birthday.
Running around playing at a May Day party given by the influential Florentine
Folco dei Portinari, the young Dante was blissfully ignorant of life and concerned only with the most innocent of games when he saw something that would change the entire course of his life. Her name was
Beatrice. Although barely more than eight years old, Folco’s daughter was already striking: it was not merely her beauty and dress but also—and more importantly—the goodness she seemed to radiate. Dante was dumbstruck. The moment he saw her, as he later recorded in
La vita nuova
, “
the vital spirit, which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart, began to tremble so violently that [he] felt the vibration alarmingly in all [his] pulses, even the weakest of them.” There could be no doubt of what it meant. “
From then on,” Dante confessed, “Love ruled over my soul.”

Thenceforth, the young Dante’s days revolved entirely around Beatrice. Her image was constantly before his eyes, and his mind was filled only with thoughts of her. From day to day, he wandered endlessly around Florence in the vain hope of catching even the faintest glimpse of his beloved. Then, one day, nine years later, he saw her again, “
dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing.” Dante trembled with excitement and anticipation. She turned her gaze toward him and gave the most courteous of greetings. It was little enough, but it was sufficient for Dante to “experience the height of bliss.” He was a prisoner of love and the hopeless captive of Beatrice herself. Returning to his room in transports of joy, he had a vision of Love, cloaked in clouds the color of fire and holding Dante’s own heart in his hand. As he later wrote: