Michelangelo was gay

However, the claim that Michelangelo's depiction of Jesus was based on his alleged lover lacks historical substantiation. Jeffrey Fraiman: Michelangelo wrote hundreds of poems over many decades. It becomes you. Was Michelangelo Gay?.

Michelangelo and Tommaso dei Cavelieri As the Renaissance's greatest sculptor, Michelangelo enjoyed enough power with the Vatican that he did not need to hide his homosexual tendencies. On one hand he took it seriously, and it was an outlet for important ideas that were too complex to put into an artwork.

But it matters to him much more than other artists. Michelangelo's interested in both drawing and writing, text and image, much more than any other artist in his time, and more than any artist until William Blake. That's the old classical line: paintings are mute poetry.

He was in several poems that when you make a work of art, you put yourself into it. James Saslow: Drawings are an index of the creative process, a thought committed to paper. How did he view his own writing? Jeffrey Fraiman: Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer includes works on paper by Gay, including quick sketches, figure drawings after the model, cartoons, finished demonstration drawings, gift drawings, as well as poems and letters, both in draft and finished form.

As discussed in the catalogue by the exhibition's curator, Carmen C. Bambach, the artist's homosexuality was an open secret among his contemporaries and integral to understanding much of his artistic production, despite frequent efforts to ignore or censor the topic beginning soon after the artist's death in On the occasion of the exhibition, I interviewed James M.

Saslow, emeritus professor of art history, theater, and Renaissance studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as well as my former graduate advisor. Michelangelo gay: the idealization of the male body in his works Although Michelangelo produced a wide variety of figures throughout his exceptional artistic career, his most relevant and daring works unquestionably focus on the male figure.

One of the many fascinating parts of this exhibition and its catalogue is getting inside Michelangelo's mind. How should a visitor consider his writings and drawings together? We love looking inside the minds of creative people because presumably there is more going on in there emotionally and aesthetically than in the average person.

A poem can explicitly state a feeling in a way visual arts cannot, and therefore poems are even more of a mirror into the mind than a drawing or painting. Michelangelo—famed artist of the Renaissance, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, sculptor of the massive marble David with killer abs and the slingshot that took down Goliath—was queer.

James Saslow: He was ambivalent about it. Poetry is very much the same. Often when Michelangelo sent a poem to somebody, he accompanied it with a letter that made fun of it. He's aware that he's not a genius poet.

Michelangelo was totally gay. This has something to do with an intense need to express himself and get his ideas and feelings on paper and out into the world. A pioneer in the study of homosexuality and the visual arts during the Italian Renaissance, Saslow began his work on Michelangelo with his first book, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Societywhich led to his second, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translationmichelangelo authoritative English translation of the artist's poetry.

Rumor Michelangelo Based Depiction

He's the most personal of artists. Michelangelo was one of the greatest masters of the High Renaissance, and his sexuality has been a subject of debate for centuries. I think it's because poetry can express ideas more overtly than visual art. Ahead of the Sunday at The Met program on January 7, which will feature Professor Saslow as one of the speakers, we discussed topics explored in the exhibition—including Michelangelo's decades-long practice as a poet, his relationships with Tommaso de' Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, the meaning of his gift drawings, and the study of Michelangelo's homoeroticism throughout the centuries since his death.