First published on April 7, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
Few artists before the present era have left so clear a record of their homosexuality as Michelangelo.
The great 16th century Italian sculptor, painter and poet - styled "Il Divino" by his contemporaries - is best known to us now for a famous Pieta, his 15-foot statue of David, and frescoes in Rome's Sistine Chapel depicting scenes from Genesis and "The Last Judgment."
We could even describe the statue of the naked David with its curiously large hands, and the chapel's "Creation of Adam" with its languorous Adam reaching out toward God, as "Michelangelo's Greatest Hits."
The best place to start, though, is an early (1503-4) painting of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. While the holy family are at the center, in the background are five young men, four of them naked, obviously more interested in one another than in the holy family. One seems to be trying to pull the cloak off the youth still wearing one. They serve no obvious purpose in the painting and seem to be there because Michelangelo wanted them there.
Mary gazes up soulfully at Jesus' face but reaches out toward his genitals. It was common in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the infant Jesus' genitals by pointing to them or placing them at the center of a painting in order to assert Jesus' full humanity - and maleness - but here Mary seems about to grasp them. It was not Michelangelo's last depiction of female attention to male genitalia.
The enormous frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) depict scenes from the Old Testament. But between the paintings at junctures in the ceiling are some 20 well-muscled naked young men, each carefully individuated. They play no role in the biblical scenes and seem off in their own worlds - bored, scowling, joking or gesturing playfully - although one man noticing the Creation of Adam seems surprised and one glancing back at the Flood behind him looks alarmed.
The Temptation scene is particularly interesting not only for its hunky, mature Adam and decidedly female serpent, but because Eve is placed sitting in front of a standing, naked Adam, her face inches away from his crotch, just turning away momentarily to take the fruit from the serpent as if she had been interrupted while doing something else.
Two decades later, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint "The Last Judgment" above the altar. There are an enormous number of characters surrounding a quite healthy and heavily muscled Jesus. The saved, the condemned and various demons all have physiques that would do credit to the best of today's steroid-enhanced bodybuilders.
Here the risen St. Sebastian is no willowy, agonized martyr but an extremely handsome, well-muscled youth holding in his hand the arrows that killed him. Here too St. Catherine looks over her shoulder toward the crotch of an originally naked St. Blasius, one of several elements that contemporaries found obscene and "fit for a bordello." Two male figures hugging each other toward the upper right remain unidentified.
Michelangelo never married and was never linked romantically with any woman. To the contrary, his poems and letters contain expressions of fervent affection for young men such as Cecchino de Bracci, Febo di Poggio and especially the young nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri.
The one woman Michelangelo befriended - after he was 60 - was the widow Vittoria Colona, something of a spiritual friend, and no one will be surprised to read that she had a "severe, masculine face." In one of his poems, Michelangelo described her as "a man in a woman."
Without doubt, the great love of his life was the vibrantly handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532 when he was 57 and Tommaso 23. Michelangelo wrote love letters and ardent love poems to him and in 1533 sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus disguised as an eagle abducting a young Ganymede. In Michelangelo's drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, pliant Ganymede.
Michelangelo's poems to Cavalieri were extravagant. "Your name nourishes my heart and soul filing each with such sweetness ... If my eyes had their share of you, only think how happy I would be." In another he wishes his hairy skin to be made into a breastplate for Tommaso and "Were I two slippers he could own and use as base to his majestic weight, I would enjoy two snowy feet at least."
Michelangelo was born out of his time. He would have been far happier in fifth century Athens. But he must have felt that if the Greeks could portray their gods and heroes as handsome musclemen, Christianity could too. He did not completely persuade his contemporaries, nor ours, but it is a tribute to his art that he came so close.