Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni is #41 in project #EuropeanBios. Supremely talented, extremely irascible, and very very gay, he was 23 years younger than his closest peer and fierce rival Leonardo and benefited enormously from ground broken by him.

I am going to depart a little bit from my usual pattern here and spend a little time comparing not the two men but instead their biographies, because the contrast between the two men is fascinating but enormously amplified – possibly created – by the contrast between the books.

I covered Leonardo Da Vinci quite recently; the biography I read was published in 2017 by Walter Isaacson, an excellent biographer who spent a lot of time learning about the specific things that made Leonardo great as an artist; specific talents and techniques.

The Michelangelo biography I read was written in 1995 by George Bull, who took a much more traditional approach and drew mostly from primary sources, such as letters written directly by Michelangelo or to him. That his art was famous is covered, obviously, but not *why*.

The result is a picture of Michelangelo as a crabby, mean man who is constantly arguing with employers about money and berating his own family, also mostly about money. The impression is of a thoroughly unlikeable man who was constantly a jerk to everyone. Is that real?

Leonardo on the other hand was loved by nearly everyone, and this is frequently mentioned in contemporary sources. He was attractive, witty, and popular at court. He had friends everywhere. The only person noted for not liking Leonardo very much was... Michelangelo.

In fairness this seems to have been mutual; they both publicly and privately sniped about each other's level of talent and there is a fair amount of what sounds like very modern catty remarks between two gay men who both would prefer that they were the center of attention.

(It's possible that Leonardo actually moved out of town to avoid Michelangelo, although there were a lot of other plausible reasons for that move.)

This brings us to probably the biggest difference between the two men. Leonardo Da Vinci was open – extremely open – about his sexuality. He had a series of long-term boyfriends and wrote essays about how great penises are, no really, and he illustrated them too.

Michelangelo on the other hand was definitely also gay but seemed permanently, constantly tortured about it. He fell in love with handsome young men over and over and wrote them steamy letters but never seems to have had a real boyfriend. Or did he?

I'll never know without reading another bio, because this treatment of Michelangelo's sexuality is conservative to the point of being homophobic. Whether he had sex with men is approached tangentially at best and is treated as a distasteful flaw in an otherwise great man if so.

The 22-year gap between the authors is almost certainly responsible. Historians are not famous for staying bang up to date with modern cultural developments and in any case 1995 was not a particularly accepting time. The result is at best half a portrait of Michelangelo.

This is by no means the first time the bias of the biographer themselves has cropped up; the best example was certainly Cleopatra, written by a woman who spent about 10% of the book making fun of obviously wrong shit male historians had said about her.

So what we do know? The other big contrast between Michelangelo and Leonardo was that Michelangelo was famous. Leonardo was well-known, but the concept of an artist as a personality, as a celebrity, was brand new at the time, created partly in response to Leonardo himself.

But Leonardo mostly didn't benefit from that effect, which was still evolving. 23 years later, the idea that an artist was a unique and important person was firmly accepted and Michelangelo was a celebrity. Popes and princes clamored for the opportunity to pay him to work.

But Michelangelo, wracked with guilt over his homosexuality, didn't want money as much as he wanted salvation. He worked partly for free on the Sistine Chapel and mostly for free on Saint Peter's Basilica, because he believed doing so would help atone for his sins.

Michelangelo painted excellently, but not as well as Leonardo, but was a much better sculptor. The relative status of these two art forms was a hotly contested subject at the time; people spent years debating whether painters were superior to sculptors or vice versa.

Like Leonardo, Michelangelo also had broad talents in other areas. He wrote poetry, he made architectural advances, and he put his engineering talents to work designing machines and fortifications for war, many of which were crucial in real battles across Italy.

He was also constantly falling in love. Like Leonardo, Michelangelo fell for younger men. He wrote them letters and poetry, artfully but mostly very obliquely declaring his affections and desires, something historians spent a great deal of time ignoring until recently.

Another sign of his fame was that he thought it worthwhile to cooperate with an authorized biography of himself. In somewhat typical Michelangelo style he used it primarily to specify who still owed him money and how much; he was constantly griping about not getting paid.

Despite the biography, more revealing information about Michelangelo is thin because he was in the constant habit of burning his sketches, notebooks, and unfinished work, in sharp contrast to Leonardo Da Vinci, who was a packrat.

This combination of erasure by both himself and homophobic historians means I don't think I really know Michelangelo. Obviously a genius, he shaped the future of art forever, but I feel like there's much more to learn about him. Perhaps another time.

Either Michelangelo was really annoying, or his biographer wrote him that way, I can't decide, but I was definitely extremely tired of reading letters in which he demanded various people pay him various amounts for specific large chunks of marble, which is about 30% of the book.

P.S. Michelangelo had a brother called Leonardo, which can make for some confusing reading.

P.P.S. Much is made of the fact that Michelangelo's David has a head and hands that are much too big for the body but this was apparently intentional; the statue was intended to be viewed from below, so these features were exaggerated to make them more easily visible.

P.P.P.S. Michelangelo was good at sculpting and painting male nudes, and threw them into everything because gay, to the point that the superfluously sexy naked men everywhere made people uncomfortable and they demanded he paint extra things over their dicks. He refused.