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Michelangelo
(1475-1564), Italian sculptor and painter |
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Michelangelo was in his late sixties when he met Cecchino dei Bracci, the charming and beautiful fifteen-year-old nephew of one of his friends. Of the boy's beauty, he wrote: "With his face God wished to correct nature." When Bracci died in 1544, at the age of sixteen, Michelangelo designed the boy's tomb and wrote no fewer than fifty poems mourning his passing. Other boys thought to have been Michelangelo's lovers were: Gherardo Perini, a muscular, strikingly beautiful young male model whose relationship with Michelangelo was the subject of much gossip at the time; Tommaso Cavalieri, an intelligent and handsome young nobleman who remained one of Michelangelo's lifelong friends; and Febo di Poggio, a young male prostitute of whom Michelangelo wrote, 'Up from the earth I rose with his wings, and death itself I could have found sweet.'
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| Contrary to popular view, Michelangelo did not lie down while painting. He drew a comic sketch (above) of himself at work to accompany a satiric sonnet he sent to a friend. It reads in part: "I have already developed a goiter...that pushes my belly under my chin. My beard points to heaven...and my brush, continuously dripping onto my face turns it into a rich mosaic. My loins have penetrated my belly, my rump's a counterweight, and I walk around in vain, without seeing where I am going...Behind, my skin is shriveled for too much bending, and I am stretched like a Syrian bow." |
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