5
IN 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.
ACT 1: IDEALIZATION
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 theCommedia. 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:
Joyful Love seemed to me and in his keeping
He held my heart; and in his arms there lay
My lady in a mantle wrapped, and sleeping.
Then he awoke her and, her fear not heeding,
My burning heart fed to her reverently.
Then he departed from my vision, weeping.
So intense was Dante’s obsessive love for Beatrice that the constant strain of thinking about her beauty made him ill. His friends became worried and, seeing that it was a girl who was causing his condition to deteriorate, pressed him to reveal her name. Gallantly, he refused to share his secret, but the gossip which spread quickly became sufficiently intolerable that Dante felt obliged to pretend he really loved someone else entirely.
It was a foolish mistake. Before long, Beatrice had heard that Dante was in love with another person. Given that she had previously guessed he had feelings for her, she was extremely annoyed. When they next met in the street, Beatrice pointedly snubbed him. Dante was devastated. “I was so overwhelmed with grief,” he wrote in La vita nuova, “that … I went to a solitary place where I drenched the earth with bitter tears.”
Setting aside all pretense, Dante no longer made any secret of his love for Beatrice. But though he hoped always that her heart would soften, his passion was unrequited. Little by little, he became a laughingstock. At a wedding, his rather affected swooning at his beloved’s beauty attracted the mockery of all present: even Beatrice poked fun at him.
After he endured this humiliating episode, some of the ladies who had laughed at Dante suggested a solution to his sorrows. There was of course nothing wrong with his love, but his error lay in his response to Beatrice’s disdain. Although he had previously written a great deal of poetry in the courtly tradition, his verses had been entirely devoted to self-pity, and he had suffered as a consequence of his willingness to wallow in despair. Since all agreed that Beatrice was as near to human perfection as could be found, Dante should concentrate not on his pain but on her incomparable beauty and virtue. In praising her in poetry, he could live his love in a different—and perhaps more edifying—manner. Beatrice would inspire a new art, and that art would prove to be Dante’s salvation.
The transformation was instantaneous. Rather than picturing Beatrice merely as a prospective mistress or as an enchanting object of love, Dante crafted a poetic image of his beloved as an ideal of beauty, the very paradigm of all that was pure and good. She became a reflection of the divine, a model of virtue, and the inspiration for a powerful, redemptive poetry. In turn, Dante’s love ceased to cause him pain and instead—through his art—came to be the centerpiece of his moral universe.
Beatrice’s unexpected death on June 8, 1290, devastated Dante. He seemed almost to lose his mind with grief, and though he resolved never to speak about her “departure,” the final parts of La vita nuova testify to the extent to which the tragedy weighed upon his heart and mind. Yet however heartbreaking her passing might have been, her death only seems to have intensified Dante’s idealization of her as the archetype of virtue and beauty. From beyond the grave, she became the epitome of philosophy and heavenly perfection, a yet more powerful incentive to write, and a fixed star by which the shattered bark of Dante’s life could set its course.
Dante’s new attitude toward his love for Beatrice was most fully and clearly expressed in the first canto of the Paradiso. Opening his narrative with a heartfelt plea to Apollo—the god of poetry and wisdom—Dante begs to be given sufficient skill to sing of the “blessed kingdom” he is about to enter, and longs to be granted the laurel crown that symbolizes both love and literary genius. His plea ended, he is then amazed to see Beatrice appear before him, her gaze fixed upon the sun, contemplating the majesty of creation. Whereas Virgil had been Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, it is clear that Beatrice will be his companion through the ethereal realm. Her role is telling. Rather than being merely an “expositor, … Beatrice is a superior intelligence … an instructress who explains the mysteries of nature, the structure of the heavens, the phased ascent from earth to the celestial empyraean.” Her beauty becoming ever more pronounced as their journey progresses, she unveils the universal truths and heavenly goodness that are both the subject of Dante’s verse and the object of his life. Although they are overlaid with elements of Aristotelian and Averroistic philosophy, it is clear that what virtue and beauty he perceives, he perceives because of her.
Abashed and a little timid at first, Michelangelo could not resist picturing himself as a new Dante and casting Tommaso in the role of a more passive—and perhaps rather nicer—Beatrice.
ACT 2: GUILT AND SORROW
Unfortunately for Michelangelo, the imitation of Dante only took him so far. There was, he rapidly discovered, a lot more to his relationship than could be modeled in Dantean terms. And—what was more—his feelings were more tortured than even Dante had experienced. Far from being content merely to worship the ideal that Tommaso represented, Michelangelo struggled with the implications of this idealism, and this feeling creeps through with particular force in the second phase of their relationship. As Bartolomeo Angiolini observed in mid-1533, Michelangelo’s poetry had begun to express a palpable sense of suffering.
The slightest coolness from Tommaso could cut Michelangelo to the quick. As it was, the young man was often more than a little standoffish. Although he claimed to esteem the artist more highly than anyone else on earth, his correspondence is occasionally somewhat distant and formal. At times—and especially during their separation in 1533—Tommaso even teased him in a manner that hovers between friendly raillery and youthful cruelty.
The feelings of being punished for having come too close, too quickly, are perhaps expressed most eloquently in The Fall of Phaethon (Fig. 13), a drawing (of which three versions exist) that Michelangelo appears to have sent to Tommaso at around the time of Angiolini’s letter. Phaethon, having persuaded his father, Helios, to let him drive his chariot across the sky, is soon frightened by the heights to which he has risen. In panic, he veers wildly across the heavens until Zeus is compelled to strike him down with a thunderbolt. That Michelangelo pictures himself as Phaethon is clear.
But Michelangelo’s torment was also a product of a deeper and more disturbing sense of uncertainty. He was, as he recognized, powerless to resist the assaults of love, but the fact that this love often shaded off into homoerotic lust prompted a crisis of conscience. Although there was a vogue for close—and even intimate—relations between men in contemporary Italy, Michelangelo seems to have been conscious of the vicious terms in which homosexuality was condemned by secular and religious authorities. As a devout Christian, he knew that Tommaso should be a reminder of God’s goodness and that such sexual desire was wrong.
This burgeoning sense of guilt was well illustrated in one of a pair of drawings Michelangelo sent to Tommaso as a New Year’s gift at the end of 1532. Depicting the story of The Punishment of Tityus (Fig. 14), it dramatized a mythological tale of divine retribution. In punishment for having attempted to rape Zeus’s concubine, Leto, the giant Tityus had been hurled down into the deepest pits of Hades to endure horrific suffering. In Michelangelo’s gift drawing, he is shown lying prostrate on the rocky ground of the underworld, while a monstrous eagle pecks hungrily at his liver. Picturing himself as Tityus, the pious Michelangelo not only showed that he harbored an irrational, physical passion for Tommaso but also demonstrated his fear of being punished for all eternity for his lust.
The feeling of guilt points toward the second phase in the evolution of Renaissance conceptions of love and sex and to another great influence on Michelangelo: Petrarch, perhaps the most important of Dante’s intellectual heirs. While staying in Bologna shortly after his hurried departure from Florence in October 1494, Michelangelo read Petrarch’s vernacular verse alongside Dante’s love poetry with Giovanfrancesco Aldovrandi, and in the years that followed, he nurtured an affection for the former that was at least as great as—if not greater than—his fondness for the Commedia and La vita nuova.
Insofar as Michelangelo’s relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri is concerned, Petrarch’s real importance lies in his transformation of Dantean themes to encompass a sense of sorrow and guilt. While drawing on Dante’s love for Beatrice as a model for his own experiences, Petrarch added an entirely new ingredient to the mixture that was born of an altogether darker combination of torment and suffering.
It was in Avignon on April 6, 1327, that Petrarch set out on a journey that would transform the course of his life. Early that morning, not long after dawn, he arrived at the church of Saint Clare for the Easter Sunday Mass. At twenty-two, he was quite the dandy. Arrayed in brightly colored and heavily perfumed clothes, he had, as always, gone to great trouble over his appearance. As he later reminisced, he regularly spent hours curling his hair in the latest fashion and fretted incessantly whenever he went out for fear that the breeze would disturb his carefully arranged locks. What was more, he considered himself a man of the world. By the standards of the day, he was certainly well educated. Having been trained in Latin grammar and rhetoric by Convenevole da Prato in nearby Carpentras, he had gone on to study law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna, two of the finest institutions of learning in Europe. But even though he was well placed to carve out a future for himself as a lawyer, he had decided not to pursue the career for which he had been intended. After his father’s death the previous year, he had inherited a sizable sum of money and had returned to Avignon to live a life of refinement and leisure, free from parental pressure and financial worries. He was a dreamer, with few aspirations other than to look good.
Easter Sunday was an opportunity to be seen, to strut around, and to be admired. The little church of Saint Clare would have been packed. Then the seat of the exiled papacy, Avignon was a thriving, bustling city, and this was the culmination of Holy Week. It was in this cramped little church that a young girl first caught Petrarch’s eye.
Her name was Laura. Petrarch gives us little clue as to her full identity—the best guess is that she was perhaps Laura de Noves, an ancestor of the notorious Marquis de Sade—but it is at least clear that at sixteen or seventeen years old she was already beautiful beyond compare. She took Petrarch’s breath away. As he later recalled, there had never been “such lovely eyes, either in our age or in the first years”; they melted him “as the sun does the snow.” From that moment, he was in love—hopelessly, utterly, and completely. The mere sight of her was a source of sheer ecstasy, and though there was occasionally a platonic dimension to Petrarch’s feelings, there is no doubt that—unlike Dante’s affection for Beatrice—his passion was primarily physical in character.
But just as Dante had found with Beatrice, Petrarch’s love was unrequited. Although the mere sight of Laura had set his heart afire, she had not been struck by Cupid’s arrow. It was not that she spurned him or mocked him as Beatrice had tormented Dante. She was simply indifferent to him and gave Petrarch no sign of affection or even of recognition. If he burned with passion, Laura was the original ice queen. She was, in every sense of the word, unattainable; indeed, Petrarch hints that she might already have been married. The trope of ice and fire recurs frequently in his poetry as a metaphor for the contrast between the two.
It was all so evocative of the myth of Apollo and Daphne that Petrarch could not resist using the story (which was later painted by Pollaiuolo) (Fig. 15) as a metaphor for his dilemma. Like Apollo, he was condemned to pursue a woman who fled from the very name of love, and yet, just as he seemed to catch up with the fleeing nymph, she escaped his grasp. The fact that Jupiter transformed Daphne into a laurel tree (Greek: Δάφνη; Latin: laurus) to save her from Apollo—the god of poetry and wisdom—seemed a telling detail.
For the next twenty-one years, Petrarch was tormented both by his love and by Laura’s coldness, and there are more than a few echoes of Dante in his accounts of this period. Petrarch’s life became one of longing and despair. Sometime after first seeing her, he purchased a little house in nearby Vaucluse in the hope of “curing” himself of his attachment. But despite his bucolic solitude, Love followed him everywhere. A “hunter” of Laura, he had himself become the hunted. In one poem, he even compares himself to Actaeon, who was transformed into a stag for having seen the naked Diana bathing and who was pursued forever by his own hounds, the very emblems of desire.
He was led ever deeper into a hopeless labyrinth from which there was no exit. Filled with sorrow, he wandered “through fields and across hills” and “from mountain to mountain,” consumed by love and grief. His feverish mind played tricks on him. His thoughts were no longer his own. Everywhere he turned, he seemed to encounter Laura. He saw her in the rocks and rivers and heard her voice in the morning breeze. Long after their first meeting, he would still see her “in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud … and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself.” Much of the time, he felt he was experiencing a living death and sometimes longed to die.
In the midst of his misery, Petrarch turned to poetry, and in this respect his thought began to diverge somewhat from Dante’s. Drawing on both his classical learning and his deep familiarity with the troubadour tradition, he began work on theCanzoniere(Songbook)—the epic collection of poetry for which he is best known—as the vehicle through which to express his emotions. Consciously equating amor with gloria, he hoped to win Laura’s hand through literary fame.
Yet what really set Petrarch apart from Dante was the agony that lay beneath these layers of suffering and ambition. Despite being crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, Petrarch was troubled by the fact that unrequited love and glory seemed to bring him only sorrow, a question that had apparently not concerned Dante too greatly. It seemed to pose a profound—and deeply moral—problem. Why was it that no matter what he did, he was completely unable to find happiness or even solace?
It was precisely this question that Petrarch addressed in the Secretum, perhaps his most intimate and autobiographical work. At the beginning of the dialogue, he pictured a fictional representation of himself brooding on his mortality and consumed with misery. Although he is terrified of the imminence of death, “Franciscus” is unable to understand how best to shake off the sorrow that affects his soul.
Miraculously, a mysterious woman—the personification of Truth—appears before him and tells him that his condition is the consequence of looking for happiness in all the wrong places. The better to explain this, she invites the ghostly figure of “Augustinus”—representing Saint Augustine—to guide Franciscus. As Augustinus explains, what Franciscus considers happiness isn’t happiness at all. Both his unrequited love for Laura and his quest for poetic glory are grounded on the belief that happiness can be found somewhere here on earth. But, says Augustinus, such a belief is absurd. Since all temporal things will inevitably change, disappear, or die, any attempt to find happiness in them is doomed to failure. Being rooted in this world, love, sex, and glory in particular bring Franciscus nothing but grief and despair, and the unfortunate man is obliged to confess that it is “want, grief, ignominy, sickness, death, and all such ills” that cause him such torment. As Augustinus explains, “true” happiness consists only in the immortal and unchanging. It can only be found in the company of God after death. Slowly but surely, he persuades Franciscus that the one sure way to earn such joy is to shed all his worldly desires and devote himself to virtue.
The solution, Augustinus explains, is to meditate on death with greater sincerity and fervor. If Franciscus were to recognize the reality of his mortality and the inevitability of his own death, he would, Augustinus claims, not fail to realize the foolishness of seeking happiness in transient things. Equipped with a proper understanding of the true nature of the “self”—the immortal soul imprisoned within a mortal body—Franciscus would naturally concentrate his attention on preparing his soul for the next life and would devote himself unhesitatingly to virtue.
Although Petrarch was intellectually convinced by his own argument, he was still not fully persuaded, and as 1347 drew to a close, the fires of his love still burned as brightly as ever. But then a tragedy of such magnitude struck Italy that he could not help but be convinced.
In early 1347, just as Petrarch was completing the first draft of the Secretum, the Black Death arrived. Brought from the East on twelve Genoese galleys, it first hit the port of Messina in Sicily, before spreading swiftly and inexorably throughout Italy. After hittingCatania, the nearest coastal city, it had infected most of Sicily within weeks. Three months later, in January 1348, the disease reached Genoa, carried by galleys bringing spices from the East, and tore down the Ligurian coast with breathtaking speed. By spring, it had reached Florence, and before summer had arrived, virtually every town and city from Palermo to Venice was in the grip of the mysterious and appalling sickness.
A sense of bewilderment and confusion took hold as people scrambled for some way of treating the disease. Special plague hospitals, often staffed by volunteers from among the mendicant orders, were hastily established in many cities, and in Venice surgeons were granted a rare dispensation to practice their art. But in the absence of any clear understanding of how the plague was spread, there was almost no hope. In Pistoia, the importation of cloths or linens was forbidden, markets were carefully controlled, and all travel to places known to have fallen victim to the plague was banned. In Milan, much harsher measures were employed. When the plague first struck, the three houses in which it was found were completely sealed. The doors were nailed shut, the windows were bricked up, and the people inside—whether healthy or sick—were left to die.
But it was all to no avail. Throughout 1348, the plague raged unabated. It struck indiscriminately: rich and poor, old and young, men and women, all fell victim to the infection. The mortality rate was appallingly high. Although historians continue to debate the exact figure, at least 45 percent—and perhaps as much as 75 percent—of the population was wiped out in the space of three years of horror. The Chronicon Estense recorded that in just two months sixty-three thousand people died, and in the thriving port of Venice around six hundred people were dying every day at the height of the plague. In Florence, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani estimated that ninety-six thousand deaths occurred between March and October 1348. In Bologna, it was reported that six out of every ten individuals succumbed, and one chronicler claimed that in the comparatively modest town of Orvieto more than 90 percent of the inhabitants fell victim to the plague between the spring and the autumn of 1348.
Predictably, the plague had a colossal impact on moral attitudes. Preachers, penitents, and artists developed a preoccupation with mortality and sin. Acutely conscious of the fragility of life and seeking to explain the pestilence as a punishment for moral lassitude, they began to find particularly potent meaning in the theme of the triumphus mortis (triumph of death). Francesco Traini’s depiction of precisely this topic in the Camposanto in Pisa shows a scene teeming with figures suffering from the plague that provides a sense of the guilt brought on by the imminence of death. Hovering above a mass of corpses, two small, winged creatures hold aloft a parchment scroll bearing the following inscription:
Knowledge and wealth,
Nobility and valor
Mean nothing to the ravages of death.
By way of illustrating this point, a huge, sinister woman with clawed feet and bat-like wings flies over the middle of the scene, a terrifying embodiment of Death itself. Her attendants circle around. Cackling demons sweep down to carry sinners off to Hell, while a few pacific angels pluck innocent children away for the peace of Heaven. Watching the whole scene from the cliff top, two bearded priests reflect on the state of mankind and anxiously study the Bible. It is unclear what text they are reading: perhaps they are searching for words of consolation, perhaps they are looking to follow the teachings of Christ more avidly, or perhaps they are finding in Revelation the chilling sense that they are indeed witnessing the end of times.
Petrarch—no less than Traini—was profoundly affected by the plague and by the moral transformation it brought about. Traveling between Parma and Verona in the early months of 1348, he saw the appalling effects of the pestilence firsthand. Almost every day he received news that another friend or relative had died, and his letters—such as that written on hearing of the death of his kinsman Franceschino degli Albizzi—are filled with heartrending lamentations. But the worst was yet to come.
On May 19, 1348, Petrarch received a terrible letter from his friend “Socrates” (Ludwig van Kempen). Laura was dead. He was heartbroken. “My lady is dead,” he wailed, “and my heart has died with her.” He had no desire to linger further in life. As he put it in one particularly affecting sonnet:
Life flees and does not stop an hour,
And Death comes after by great stages;
And present and past things,
Make war on me, and the future also,
And, remembering and expecting both weighs
Me down on this side, and on that …
I see the winds turbulent for my voyaging,
I see storm in port, and wearied now,
My helmsman, and the masts and lines broken,
And the beautiful stars, at which I used to gaze, extinguished.
But gradually, he came to revisit Augustinus’s words in the Secretum. Now it was painfully clear that no real happiness could be found on earth—not when someone as dear to him as Laura could be snatched away so cruelly. Her death seemed to illustrate how fragile the world was and how foolish worldly desires really were.
His love underwent a last and dramatic metamorphosis. In place of the burning, sexual passion that had consumed him in his youth, Petrarch found himself drawn to Laura’s memory by a more spiritual longing. He continued to love her, not for her body, but for her soul. In Petrarch’s verse, Laura herself is transformed. The taunting mistress now became a figure of redemption, a spirit capable of leading him to virtue. In one particularly telling poem, Petrarch flees the scorching effects of temptation and seeks refuge beneath the branches of the laurel tree that represents his beloved. The “beautiful leaves” protect him from the storms of worldly desire, and as he contemplates its virtuous shade, the laurel is transformed once again, assuming the form of a crucifix. From beyond the grave, Laura pointed the way not to lust or glory but to heaven. It was an enduring idea. This image—which was later picked up and developed by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Serafino Ciminelli dell’Aquila (1466–1500), and in Matteo Maria Boiardo’sOrlando innamorato (1476–83)—was ultimately to find its expression in Baldassare Castiglione’s claim that “the kinds of beauty which every day we see in corruptible bodies” were unworthy of the affections of a noble lover.
Death had indeed triumphed, and the terrible sufferings the pestilence had brought were a reminder of the need to put away worldly pleasures. Mindful of the fleetingness of life and the imminence of judgment, man should repudiate sex; and even love—in its conventional form—should be despised. In its place, man should cling to virtue and pursue the love of the divine in the hope of attaining happiness in the next life. Even though Petrarch repeatedly failed to adhere to his own dictates (and even went on to father a number of children while in holy orders), he clearly acknowledged that chastity and devotion represented the only way forward. As Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora’s The Combat of Love and Chastity (ca. 1475–1500) illustrated, the sharp arrows of desire should break against the soul’s chaste shield (Fig. 16). Forged in the dark night of sorrow, it was a grim ethic that made man an insensible pilgrim in the body and required life to be lived with closed eyes on bended knee. And what was more, the tense relationship between love, sex, and death that underpinned it seems to have appealed to Michelangelo for some time.
ACT 3: THE PLEASURES OF THE FLESH
As The Punishment of Tityus suggests, Michelangelo seems to have taken to heart the Petrarchan dichotomy between physical desire and death. Throughout the verses he addressed to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, he went to great lengths to stress that—because he recognized his own mortality—his love was utterly chaste. This was, indeed, the basis on which Michelangelo pleaded for greater intimacy with the distant young man. “Your soul,” he claimed in a poem written in 1533, “more willing to respond / than I dare hope to the chaste fire that glows / within me, will have pity and draw close.”
But despite his protestations, Michelangelo’s demeanor seemed to suggest that his intentions were not altogether pure. Already in late 1532 or early 1533, tongues had begun to wag. Gossips began to speculate that Michelangelo, far from being chaste, was in fact a dirty old man. When this reached Tommaso’s ears, he was unable entirely to dismiss his suspicions and actually refused to see the artist for a while. Distraught, Michelangelo felt obliged to pen a verse rejecting the accusations.
Although Michelangelo had sincerely endeavored to conquer his physical passions, he had been unable to succeed. Even as he protested his chastity, he admitted that he wanted to have “my sweet and longed-for lord forever stay / folded in these unworthy, ready arms.” At times, he actually seemed to revel in his sexual longings and gave way to his libido with unashamed excitement while simultaneously recalling his pious intentions.
In attempting to justify his lust, Michelangelo came to turn Petrarch’s argument on its head. Precisely because life was so short and sin resulted in damnation, he felt he really should just surrender himself to the passion that he was unable to conquer entirely. In a verse written in ca. 1534–35, he confessed that he was still pained by the realization that the “misery” of his affection for Tommaso was more important to him than virtue, but since God had not punished him by striking him dead, he could see no reason to refrain from his desire. And since he was unable to resist the lust that would surely land him in Hell after death, Michelangelo believed that Tommaso’s embrace might be the only taste of Heaven he could hope to experience. A powerless captive of the young man’s beauty, he was forced to conclude that it would be best to play the devout, lustful martyr until he died. As he put it at the end of the verse:
If only blest when caught and conquered here,
no wonder I remain, naked, alone,
the prisoner of a well-armed cavalier.
In succumbing to physical passion in defiance of the pains of death, Michelangelo set himself at a distance from both Dante and Petrarch. Yet as he was diverging from two of the more dominant literary constructions of love, he was simultaneously drawing on an entirely different tradition of thought that used the fragility of human existence as justification for the unfettered indulgence of sexual pleasure. Here, Michelangelo was not so much reenacting the experiences of an individual figure as playing the role of a priapic Bacchus that represented the spirit of an entire period of Renaissance history. It consisted of two parallel strands, each of which brought together art and life in a manner that was even more intense—and even more exciting—than anything that had gone before.
Carpe Diem: Sex and Death
Initially, it was the experience of the Black Death that paved the way for the triumph of pleasure. With death lurking around every corner, people not only became more acutely aware of the imminence of the afterlife but also came to realize that life should be lived to the full while it lasted. As Boccaccio observed in the prologue to the Decameron, the constant danger of infection pushed people to extremes. While some chose to lock themselves away in a desperate bid to avoid the pestilence, others were convinced that the best way to ward off the plague “was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, gratifying all of [their] cravings whenever the opportunity offered.” Those who were of this opinion were driven to ever more indulgent excess by the realization that life was more precious than they had ever thought. Strict sumptuary laws governing dress were all but forgotten, and there was suddenly a profusion of beautifully colored fabrics, delicate, fascinating embroidery, and risqué dresses for women. Pleasure became a way of life, and promiscuity appears to have increased no end. With crucial social barriers broken down by the fragmentation of family life, people gave themselves over to merrymaking and rampant sex whenever the occasion presented itself. Even monks and friars broke “the rules of obedience and [gave] themselves over to carnal pleasures, thereby thinking to escape, and … turned lascivious and dissolute.”
Having witnessed the arrival of the plague firsthand, Boccaccio was deeply affected by this new, pleasure-loving ethic. Although many of his early works betray a strongly amorous and even erotic spirit—especially Il ninfale fiesolano, the “aggressive and sadistic details” of which have occasionally been condemned as being “in execrably bad taste”—the lusty prose of his youth had always concealed a note of moral uncertainty, and he had even been moved to pen the wildly self-critical (but startlingly misogynistic)Corbaccio. After the first onslaught of the Black Death, however, Boccaccio shed his doubts. By the time he came to write the Decameron, he had fully embraced the unashamed joie de vivre of the post-plague period.
Widely regarded as Boccaccio’s prose masterpiece, the Decameron is set in Florence at the very height of the plague. Appalled by the devastation, its central characters—seven young women and three young men—decide to take refuge from the pestilence at a country estate just outside the city. Surrounded by “delectable gardens and meadows,” they devote themselves to “feasting and merrymaking” and determine to while away the ten days that follow by telling stories. It is the content of these tales that really testifies to the profound shift in attitudes toward desire in fourteenth-century Italy. Although some of the stories—such as the tale of Griselda—deal with questions of virtue and honor, the vast majority are lusty, bawdy yarns that teem with cuckolded husbands, randy monks, drinking binges, and almost continual fornication.
The imminence of death had persuaded Boccaccio that life could be more fun with a bit more sex. Yet he was still far from being a libertine and was careful to guard against the charge of outright immorality by adding a moralizing conclusion to some of his stories, as a formulaic nod to the vestiges of propriety. A good example is provided by the story of Berto della Massa, a young rogue who decides to disguise himself as a friar to pursue his nefarious desires more easily. Taking the name of Friar Alberto, he heads off to Venice, where he promptly conceives a burning lust for Monna Lisetta da Ca’ Quirino, “a frivolous and scatterbrained young woman,” who comes to him for confession. In order to overcome her moral scruples, he persuades her that the archangel Gabriel has fallen in love with her and wishes to visit her at home that evening. Disguising himself with a pair of fake wings, Friar Alberto then appears in her bedroom and deludes the naive, awestruck Monna Lisetta into letting him have his wicked way. Only when her relatives discover his ploy and burst in on him during the act does his fun come to an ignominious end. After jumping out the window into the Grand Canal, he is ultimately caught, tied to a pillar near the Rialto, and covered with honey to attract flies. It is plain that this is meant to be a “moral” ending. But while the storyteller (Pampinea) observes that Berto della Massa “got the punishment he deserved” and expresses her wish that “a similar fate should befall each and every one of his fellows,” it is equally clear that the function and appeal of the story is to amuse with humor and to excite the passions with ludicrous sexual adventurism. Rather than transforming the tale into a morally improving story, Berto della Massa’s comeuppance only increases its entertainment value.
For the most part, however, Boccaccio simply didn’t bother to conceal his celebration of sexual pleasure. At times, he was quite explicit and cheerfully played with Christian concepts to underscore the merit of enjoying life while it was still possible. Perhaps the best example is found when his characters set themselves to proving that nothing can possibly eradicate humanity’s natural desire for sex. In one story, a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl from Barbary named Alibech is so captivated by the Christian faith that she decides to run away to the desert so she can learn about religion from one of the devout hermits who reside there. After much wandering, she is eventually taken in by the pious young Rustico, who is determined not only to teach her virtue but also to resist her charms. But after giving her a harsh lecture about the importance of serving God by “putting the devil back into Hell,” Rustico discovers that his moral fiber isn’t quite as tough as he had first thought. Within minutes, he is unable to suppress a raging erection. The exchange that follows is a tour de force of Boccaccio’s ethic. “Rustico,” Alibech asks,
“what is that thing I see sticking out in front of you, which I do not possess?”
“Oh, my daughter,” said Rustico, “this is the devil I was telling you about. Do you see what he’s doing? He’s hurting me so much that I can hardly endure it.”
“Oh, praise be to God,” said the girl, “I can see that I am better off than you are, for I have no such devil to contend with.”
“You’re right there,” said Rustico. “But you have something else instead, that I haven’t.”
“Oh?” said Alibech. “And what’s that?”
“You have Hell,” said Rustico. “And I honestly believe that God has sent you here for the salvation of my soul, because if this devil continues to plague the life out of me, and if you are prepared to take sufficient pity upon me to let me put him back into Hell, you will be giving me marvellous relief, as well as rendering incalculable service and pleasure to God, which is what you say you came here for in the first place.”
“Oh, Father,” replied the girl in all innocence, “if I really do have a Hell, let’s do as you suggest just as soon as you are ready.”
“God bless you, my daughter,” said Rustico …
At which point he conveyed the girl to one of their beds, where he instructed her in the art of incarcerating that accursed fiend.
Boccaccio—perhaps like his audience—didn’t see any problem with this. In fact, in the conclusion to the story, he praises Rustico for preparing Alibech for her subsequent marriage to Neerbal, before adding that ladies should “learn to put the devil back in Hell, for it is greatly to [God’s] liking and pleasurable to the parties concerned, and a great deal of good can arise and flow in the process.”
The belief that the imminence of death almost obliged one to indulge sexual desire endured well after the worst effects of the plague had subsided, and it had found its way from the Decameron into the mainstream of Renaissance culture by the middle of the fifteenth century. Although Petrarch’s self-denying morality continued to be admired and imitated, even his most devoted admirers began to cultivate the pleasure principle, and followed Boccaccio in justifying sexual abandon with reference to the uncertainties of life.
One of the clearest illustrations of the triumph of pleasure—and its relationship to death—is provided by the carnival songs (canti carnascialeschi) that became popular in Florence from the middle of the quattrocento onward and that may even have been instigated by Lorenzo de’ Medici himself. Specially commissioned for the occasion by a wealthy patron or a brigata (company of friends), such songs were a dramatic combination of musical excitement and visual display and were usually performed by professional singers on a richly decorated wagon. They were, by definition, titillating affairs. Yet two of the most popular canti of the high Renaissance testify to the symbiotic relationship between mortality and sex in the cultural imagination and to the importance of divine judgment in heightening pleasure. Performed on a positively funereal carriage filled with singing skeletons, the “Canzona de’ morti” (Song of death) begins with a reminder that “anguish, tears and penance / torment us constantly” and proceeds to emphasize that death comes to us all, often unexpectedly. “We were once as you are now,” sang the skeletal performers, “You will be as we; / We are dead as you can see, / Thus dead will we see you.” But while it was a terrifying display of human frailty, its function in the carnival appears actually to have complemented the spirit of sensual abandon. In the Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna (Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne), Lorenzo de’ Medici followed Boccaccio in using the imminence of death as a reminder of the importance of seizing sensual opportunities. Lorenzo summed it up nicely in the famous ritornello:
How beautiful is youth,
Which flies away nonetheless!
Let him who would be happy seize the day,
For tomorrow may not come.
If death and possibly Hell await, Lorenzo seemed to ask, why not enjoy life while you still can? As a young man, Michelangelo would certainly have heard this question posed—perhaps by Lorenzo himself—and there is a sense that it still lurked in his mind after he met Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.
From the Dignity of Man to a Theory of Pleasure
There were good practical reasons for Boccaccio and Lorenzo de’ Medici to advocate sexual abandon in the face of death, but there still remained the problem of how to deal with the moral and religious issues that they tried to sweep under the carpet. Although “why not?” was a sufficient basis for bawdy storytelling and carnival revelry, it wasn’t exactly a compelling philosophical response to the theological injunctions against carnal pleasure, or an effective riposte to Petrarch’s grim and self-denying morality.
The central obstacle to sexual indulgence was the distinction between the body and the soul or intellect. For Petrarch, the soul was an unwilling prisoner of the body. The physical world was a lower, “perverted” form of reality, while the spiritual or intellectual realm that could be enjoyed only after death was the only genuine source of truth and happiness. Man would only be “himself” when he was freed from his corporeal form, and could only earn this reward by shutting himself off from earthly temptation.
For the Ligurian humanist Bartolomeo Facio (ca. 1400–57), physical pleasure was the antithesis of human dignity. In his treatise De hominis excellentia (On the excellence of man), Facio explained that while man had been created in God’s image and likeness, only the soul was divine and celestial. In contrast to the body, which rotted and decomposed after death, the soul was immortal and capable of returning to its heavenly origins. Thus it was clear that man’s dignity lay not in the actualization of corporeal pleasures but in the life of the soul and the contemplation of God. Facio even went so far as to castigate those blind men who, “forgetful of their excellence and dignity, seek … corrupt and fleeting things so eagerly.” Sex, in other words, was most definitely infra dig.
By the mid-fifteenth century, however, this long-accepted dichotomy began to be challenged. Perhaps inspired by the sheer physical terror of the plague, men and women started to question whether the body and the soul were really all that different, and tentatively began to ask whether man didn’t possess a little more dignity than Petrarch and Facio had given him credit for.
It was the eclectic Florentine polymath Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) who broke the mold. Opposing the tough and uncompromising morality of previous centuries in his De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the dignity and excellence of man), Manetti set out to offer a much more positive view of human nature. His approach was certainly original. It wasn’t that he disagreed with Petrarch, Facio, or even the forbidding medieval Pope Innocent III on fundamentals. He was quite happy to acknowledge that there wasa difference between the body and the soul. But for Manetti, this didn’t mean that life had to be miserable. Quite the opposite. In Manetti’s view, God had created the world for man’s use. And although humanity did possess two natures—corporeal and spiritual—God had not only created man as a whole person but had also given him all the faculties necessary to fulfill his purpose within the scheme of creation. Created in God’s image, man had been endowed with a whole range of abilities—reason, intelligence, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and so on—that allowed him both to interpret the physical universe in accordance with the inclinations of his soul and to manipulate everything around him according to his own reason for the sake of salvation. Man thus became an almost Promethean inventor, capable not only of enjoying the world around him but also of shaping his own destiny. Rather than being condemned to endure the fickleness and instability of earthly existence—as Petrarch and Facio had believed—man was both the master and the measure of all things. As a consequence, Manetti believed that man was “the most beautiful, the most ingenious, the most wise, the most opulent, and the most potent” of all animals.
This was exciting in and of itself, but its implications were even more earth-shattering. From Manetti’s reasoning, it seemed that God had ensured that man would pursue the right path by making some things more enjoyable than others. What was necessary became pleasurable, and it was the pursuit of pleasure that had led humanity not only to survive but also to become civilized. As Aurelio Lippo Brandolini (ca. 1454–97) argued in his Dialogus de humanae vitae conditione et toleranda corporis aegritudine(Dialogue on the condition of human life and on bearing bodily sickness),
Since a certain pleasure and delight has been attached by nature to those things which pertain to human nourishment and propagation lest anyone should neglect his life or his offspring through boredom or labour, and thereby cause the human race itself to come to an end, necessity is gradually converted into luxury; nor is only what is sufficient sought but what lust desires, and things by degrees have come to the point that men think that they can in no way live without wheat, wine, wool, buildings, and many even not without odours, unguents, plumes, and other delights. And apart from this condition there originated for men agriculture, navigation, construction of buildings, innumerable gainful arts, from this finally all labours so that they may be fed in elegance, abound in clothing and buildings, enjoy those pleasures which [are sometimes called] so miserable and so troublesome.
Physical pleasure was, in other words, an intrinsic part of human existence: men and women simply had to enjoy themselves in order to fulfill their roles in God’s plan for humanity. “It will be difficult,” Manetti argued,
if not impossible, to say how greatly man is taken by the pleasures which arise from seeing beautiful bodies, from hearing sounds and harmonies and other great and varied things, from smelling flowers and other similar odours, from tasting sweet foods and suave wines, [and] from touching the softest substances … Therefore, if men … enjoyed more pleasures in life than they are tormented by troubles and anguish, they ought to be joyful and consoled, rather than complain and lament; especially since nature supplies more remedies for cold, heat, labours, pains, and diseases … that are soft, sweet, and abundantly pleasurable; for just as when we eat and drink in driving away hunger and thirst we are marvellously pleased, so when we get well, when we cool off, when we rest, likewise we have pleasure.
This was even more true when it came to sexual pleasure, and Manetti made use of quasi-Darwinian arguments in contending that sexual ecstasy had been created for a very definite reason:
Those [pleasures] which are generally and specifically perceived by the touch of the genitalia seem in a certain way more delightful than all other touchable things. The philosophers say that this was done by Nature … not blindly or by chance but by certain reasons and for evident purposes, so that far greater pleasures are received in eating and drinking because she gave priority to the preservation of the species over that of individuals.
If man did not enjoy physical pleasures, Manetti argued, he was not only forgetting his own nature but also harming both himself and humanity as a whole.
Exciting and inspiring though Manetti’s argument may have been, he nevertheless allowed his critics scope for disagreement. Even if it was accepted that humanity had an obligation to enjoy all the pleasures life had to offer, the fact that Manetti continued to distinguish between body and soul raised a question about whether there was, in fact, a scale of happiness. Physical pleasures were all well and good, a critic might have said, but the soul was still the noblest part of the whole man: this being so, it was only fair to ask whether the pleasures of the soul were not still superior to the pleasures of the body.
It was left to Manetti’s compatriot the priest-philologist Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407–57) to solve this problem. Truculent, irascible, and powerfully argumentative, Valla patched up the gaps in Manetti’s thinking to offer a strong defense of physical pleasure in the De voluptate (1431). Conceived as a dialogue between three friends, each of whom represents a different school of philosophy, this work was devoted to exploring the relative merits of the lives of pleasure and contemplation and, in doing so, concentrated heavily on the nature of happiness.
Valla began by observing that Aristotle had identified three ways of living—the life of pleasure, the civil or political life, and the contemplative life—and noted that each of these was pursued both for its own sake and for the sake of happiness. Yet, Valla argued, there was a problem inherent in this distinction. How could you say that all three modes of living were pursued for their own sake and for the sake of happiness at the same time? This suggested that happiness was both intrinsic to all three, yet somehow different. It couldn’t be both at once. Since happiness had to be an absolute state, it was obvious to Valla that if happiness was to be found, all three ways of living had to be combined. None was superior to the others, and all was a part of the “good life.” Pleasure, in other words, was a necessary part of happiness.
Valla was, however, no fool. He knew that this view would arouse more than a little opposition. In particular, he anticipated that some of his stuffier friends would try to argue that even if “pleasure” was a part of happiness, there were different ways of understanding the concept. Indeed, Valla knew that someone would inevitably argue that intellectual pleasure was superior to physical pleasure and that “contemplation” was the ideal way of living. Determined to head critics off at the pass, Valla immediately smashed this argument to pieces.
Since the word “pleasure” is used to describe both intellectual and physical enjoyment, Valla believed that the two were identical: both formed a part of what pleasure really was. It was foolish, he believed, to draw an artificial distinction between the two: although corporeal enjoyment and spiritual enjoyment were subtly different modes of experience, both body and soul still enjoyed the same pleasure. It was thus impossible to defend a contemplative life as something distinct or better. Even if one could speak of a contemplative life, Valla—like Epicurus—argued that since all types of enjoyment are identical, contemplation actually aimed at pleasure, which was both intellectual and physical. When this was turned on its head, it was apparent that the pursuit of pleasure was, in fact, a part of contemplation, and thus it was obvious that sensuality was the best—indeed the only—virtuous way of life.
Between them, Valla and Manetti had produced a more positive and exciting vision of human existence and a workable theoretical justification for the new spirit of sensual indulgence that had been described with such passion and joy by Boccaccio and Lorenzo de’ Medici. Far from being infra dig, sex and pleasure were, in fact, the essence of human dignity. And it was a lesson that Michelangelo seems to have taken strongly to heart.
ACT 4: RESOLUTION
Having idealized Tommaso de’ Cavalieri in imitation of Dante, tormented himself with sorrow and self-hatred in the manner of Petrarch, and given way temporarily to his lusts with all the enthusiasm of Boccaccio, Valla, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo finally found himself in a quandary. He was, in a word, torn. On the one hand, he loved the distant and occasionally cold Tommaso as the embodiment of all that was good and true, and was compelled by the imminence of death to shrink from all but the purest and most spiritual form of love. But on the other hand, he was also driven by an irrepressible sexual desire that he enjoyed, celebrated, and extolled. Drawing on rival traditions of Renaissance thought to give expression to the conflict, he was tearing himself apart. He needed to find a way of reconciling the two sides of his character. He needed to find a way of uniting love, sex, and death.
As 1533 drew on, Michelangelo had a revelation. There is no telling whether it dawned on him slowly or came all of a sudden, but the light of a solution began to shine through the clouds of his tortured relationship just as the sniping gossip of friends was beginning to bite. He began to see that there need not be any conflict at all. Earth and heaven were bound together in a chain of goodness and splendor that linked the body directly with God himself. What made Tommaso so beautiful—and so titillating—was not the fact that he represented all that was perfect but rather the fact that his beauty was itself a part of the divine. The pleasures of the flesh, the love of the ideal, and the longing for virtue could all come together at once. Michelangelo could love Tommaso physically andspiritually at the same time. Indeed, this new form of love seemed almost like an act of worship in itself. In a blaze of inspiration, Michelangelo scribbled it all down in one of his most revealing verses:
Here in your lovely face I see, my lord,
what in this life no words could ever tell;
with that, although still clothed in flesh, my soul
has often already risen up to God.
And if the foolish, fell, malevolent crowd
point others out as sharing their own ill,
I do not cherish less this yearning will,
the love, the faith, the chaste desire of good.
To wise men there is nothing that we know
more like that fount of mercy whence we come
than every thing of beauty here below;
nor is there other sample, other fruit
of heaven on earth; he who loves you with faith
transcends to God above and holds death sweet.
The same sentiments shone through in The Rape of Ganymede (Fig. 17), the second of the two gift drawings that Michelangelo sent Tommaso at the very end of 1532. This depicted a tale of divine infatuation. As Tommaso would have known from Ovid’sMetamorphoses, Ganymede was just a humble Trojan shepherd, but his extraordinary good looks had inflamed Zeus’s passion. Lustful and impulsive, the god had to have Ganymede for himself. In Michelangelo’s picture, Zeus, having transformed himself into an eagle, is shown carrying the lad up to Olympus to be his cup bearer. But far from showing any surprise, Ganymede seems to be caught between a loving swoon and an expression of pure ecstasy. Here, Michelangelo seems to have pictured himself in the place of both characters at the same time. Like Zeus, he clearly burned with a powerful desire for the boy’s physical form and longed to snatch the handsome youth away for an eternity of platonic pleasure; and, like Ganymede, he felt himself carried heavenward by a love that he was powerless to resist. The love of the physical, in other words, became not merely an act of worship but also a transcendent experience. Everything—love, physical passion, spiritual closeness, religious belief—came together at once.
In this final “act” of the drama of his relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Michelangelo was reenacting a part of his own youth. As a young man in the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he had been welcomed into a circle of humanists, the most prominent members of which included Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Avid students and translators of Greek philosophy, these Neoplatonists (or, as Richard Mackenney has revealingly termed them, these “Neo-Neoplatonists”) had succeeded in reconciling the disparate strands of Renaissance thought in an environment that was permeated not only by the reckless adoration of physical beauty but also by the inexorable expansion of intellectual horizons. And while there is no direct evidence of Michelangelo’s ever having studied their works in any depth, there can be little doubt that he was exposed to their ideas in the heady atmosphere of intellectual debate and sensory indulgence that filled the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Years later, it was to the half-remembered reminiscences of adolescent discussions that Michelangelo turned in resolving his inner torments, and it was Ficino and Pico della Mirandola who served as the models for this last and most compelling phase in the evolution of his love for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.
True “Renaissance” men by virtue of their immense learning and kaleidoscopic interests, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) were both eclectic, excitable, and intellectually vigorous individuals who were not insensible either to the colossal variety of creation or to the pleasures of the physical world. A student of the Greek scholar Georgius Gemistus Plethon, Ficino was the first to translate the entirety of Plato’s works into Latin and, despite being in holy orders, nurtured strong but latent homoerotic desires that found expression in his passionate letters to Giovanni Cavalcanti. So, too, the noble Pico not only became fluent in Latin and Greek at an early age but was also particularly unusual for his deep knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew. He pursued a remarkable form of syncretism that embraced everything from Plato and Aristotle to the Kabbalah and the writings of Hermes Trismegistus at the same time as he was conducting a scandalous affair with one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s married cousins and being accused of heresy by Pope Innocent VIII. In contrast to Ficino, who died in his own bed at Careggi, Pico was poisoned, perhaps as a consequence of his close ties to Savonarola.
But of their amazingly wide interests, what attracted and influenced Michelangelo the most was the one that grew out of the social environment in which they gathered. Although there has been some doubt whether it can be described as an academy, Ficino and Pico—along with others, including Cristoforo Landino—formed part of a large group that would meet regularly at the Medici villa at Careggi at the invitation of Lorenzo the Magnificent to discuss the very latest ideas. The atmosphere (of which Michelangelo saw only a pale shadow at the Pa- lazzo Medici Riccardi) was constantly abuzz with excitement. Fueled by the rediscovery and translation of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, these most extraordinary of men were surrounded at Careggi by a veritable cult of beauty, a palpable sense of joy at the immense possibilities of the human mind, a love of friendship, a latent sexual tension, and a powerful desire for the new learning to be reconciled with the Christian faith. In these intellectually vibrant gatherings, Ficino and Pico encountered a broadening of the horizons of human experience beyond the limits of anything that had been imagined before, and—what was more—they felt an irrepressible need to bring everything together into one satisfying system of thought that both explained and justified the essence of all they found at Lorenzo’s villa.
Out of this environment grew a fascination for the unity of all creation. This idea—which ultimately brought into play a truly exciting conception of human dignity and a passionate commitment to love—revolved around two other, closely connected ideas. On the one hand, everything was linked. Rather than consisting of two very distinct realms—the spiritual or heavenly and the physical or worldly—the Neoplatonists conceived of the universe as a series of hierarchies, each of which was linked to the others in a chain of decreasing perfection. On the other hand, each of the hierarchies in the chain was defined by the extent to which it manifested Platonic “forms” or “ideas.” Thus, while the “cosmic mind”—the highest and most perfect of the hierarchies—was an incorruptible realm of Platonic ideas and angels, the “realm of nature”—which humans inhabit—consisted of a corruptible compound of form and matter.
The implications of this were important. Although the different hierarchies were in some senses distinct, they were nevertheless bound together by “a divine influence emanating from God.” All participated in God himself by virtue of their creation, and each hierarchy necessarily reflected the character of those above it. The forms and ideas in the “cosmic mind,” for example, were the “prototypes of whatever exists in the lower zones,” and by extension everything in the “realm of nature” was a less perfect manifestation of its prototype in the higher realms. As Pico put it in his Heptaplus:
Everything which is in the totality of worlds is also in each of them and none of them contains anything which is not to be found in each of the others … whatever exists in the inferior world will also be found in the superior world, but in a more elevated form; and whatever exists on the higher plane can also be seen down below but in a somewhat degenerate and, so to say, adulterated shape … In our world, we have fire as an element, in the celestial world the corresponding entity is the sun, in the supra-celestial world the seraphic fire of the Intellect. But consider their difference: the elemental fire burns, the celestial fire gives life, the supra-celestial loves.
The Neoplatonists believed that since the “realm of nature” was relatively low down in the scheme of creation, perfect beauty could not exist here on earth. By extension, anything that was in some imperfect way beautiful was a manifestation of a more sublime, heavenly beauty, and hence reflected a fragment of a higher “idea” or truth. Thus, even though man possessed an imperfect body, his physical form could sometimes reflect a measure of the ideal, while his rational soul—being incorporeal—was a yet more direct reflection of divinity.
If this was true, Ficino and Pico reasoned, it seemed possible for man to transcend the limits of his corporeal existence and achieve a sort of “union” with the higher, divine “idea” on which all else was modeled. This was all a matter of contemplation, for which man, being uniquely endowed with a sense of reason that allowed him to “ascend” and “descend” to higher and lower realms, was ideally suited. For it was in contemplation that “the soul withdraws from the body and from all external things into its own self … and there it discovers not only its own divinity, but in a gradual ascent, the intelligible world, the transcendent ideas, and God Himself, their common source.” On ascending to this ultimate realm of the divine idea—an experience that Ficino, following Plato, described as a “divine frenzy” and attributed to the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Sibyls—man felt an incomparable bliss, a sense of pure and consuming ecstasy.
This idea of contemplation and ecstatic union was intimately linked to ideas of love. What had motivated God’s creation of the universe was love. This love had manifested itself in a beauty that pointed the way toward God Himself. The life of contemplation—which aimed at transcendent union—thus entailed a full recognition of the essential character of beauty, and hence led to a desire for the ultimate fulfillment of beauty itself. This desire was, for Ficino and Pico, nothing more than love. To put this another way, contemplation required love, and love required a longing for beauty. The enjoyment of beauty was thus implicitly linked to ecstasy and even worship.
Although there are many different interpretations of the painting, it seems likely that it was this idea that Sandro Botticelli encapsulated in The Birth of Venus (ca. 1486), which was perhaps intended for the Medici villa at Careggi. In this most instantly recognizable of images, Botticelli depicted the goddess Venus (who had sprung out of the severed testicles of Uranus after they had been thrown into the sea by Cronos) being blown ashore on the island of Cythera. Classically beautiful, she is every inch the goddess of love. But the desire and love that her beauty inspires are not only somewhat chaste (as is suggested by the iconography of the shell on which she is standing and by the robe with which Horae, goddess of the seasons, is about to clothe her); they are also intended to point toward the heavenly realms. Her beauty emphasizes that she represents a divine love, and the ecstasy she inspires is bound up with contemplation of this fact.
Ficino pushed the boundaries of contemplation even further and consciously set out to revive the notion of platonic love in his translation of and commentary on Plato’s Symposium. The essence of contemplation, Ficino argued, could be identified with the love of others and with a friendship between those pursuing the same goal. What he had in mind was, of course, a powerful, spiritual bond between like-minded individuals, but although he was careful to avoid condoning unrestrained sexual passion, his identification of contemplation with the “desiderio di bellezza” also obliged Ficino to imbue this bond with a shared celebration of beauty—especially homoerotic beauty.
The result was a powerful resolution of long-running uncertainties in Renaissance thought. Pointing to the unity of all creation, the Neoplatonists exalted man’s capacity to reunite himself with God through a form of contemplation that demanded not only an exultant enjoyment of beauty (as a reflection of the divine) but also a deep and lasting love between individuals. This love was itself an act of worship and transcendence: it took the individual out of himself and elevated him heavenward, and it bound religious belief, the wonders of the physical world, and the soaring possibilities of the mind together in a single, semi-orgasmic whole.
It was in this dimension of Neoplatonism that Michelangelo found his salvation. Unable—or perhaps unwilling—to pursue a fully sexual relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, he had at last found a means of worshipping him as a reflection of the divine, of loving him as the very model of human beauty without fear of sin, and of enjoying the rapture that he knew so well. Abandoning the self-flagellating morality of Petrarch and the unsatisfying libertinism of Boccaccio and Valla, he learned from Ficino and Pico that Tommaso could become his own Venus, a demigod who pointed the way toward Heaven and could be adored physically, spiritually, and chastely.
In the years that followed his first meeting with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Michelangelo had undergone the extremes of pain and pleasure. He had loved deeply, he had been saddened by rebuffs, he had been tormented by guilt, and he had found ecstasy in adoration. But perhaps most important, in his verses and drawings, he had sought to understand and express his innermost feelings through the ideas and images that had arisen out of others’ experiences of the world and of love. Often turning to the language of classical antiquity, he had relived the joys and the sorrows of those such as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Manetti, Valla, Ficino, and Pico in an attempt to find solace and satisfaction. And in doing so, he had reenacted the personal dramas that had inspired and motivated the cultural masterpieces of the Renaissance. As such, Michelangelo’s fraught relationship with Tommaso can be seen as a microcosm of the Renaissance itself that underscores the extent to which the intellectual world of the Renaissance artist was derived not from high-minded ideals divorced from reality but from a desperate attempt to comprehend the grim and delightful experiences that made up everyday life.