We may wonder how Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475–1564) came to poetry at all.
Through his
sculpture, we might say. He was fifteen when a carving of his caught
the eye of Lorenzo de’ Medici,
who was so impressed that he took the boy into his own home.
During the two years spent at the palazzo of Lorenzo, who was
himself a poet of distinction, Michelangelo must have heard much poetry and
much talk of poetry. Somewhat later, when he was the guest of a
nobleman in Bologna, he delighted his host by reading aloud, in his
Tuscan accent, from the Italian poets. Dante he knew almost by
heart. When he was about twenty-eight, already famous for his Pietà,
his David, and other works, we are told that for a time he did
nothing with brush or chisel, but instead devoted his time to
reading poetry and writing sonnets
for his own pleasure, turning to
verse for what he could not express through sculpture or painting.

From his late twenties until he was
nearly sixty, his life was a tumult of activity: quarrying stones in
the mountains, harassed by conflicting commitments, busy for years
with the famous ceiling and the Medici chapel, even supervising the
fortifications of Florence in a time of crisis. From those decades,
we have fewer than two poems a year, many, like most of his
sculptures, unfinished.
But in the fifteen years that followed, the period of his two great
loves, his literary output almost quadrupled.
He was fifty-seven when
he met the handsome Roman aristocrat Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, then
about twenty-three.
For Tommaso some of Michelangelo’s greatest sonnets were written,
expressing an ardor his Platonism justified by seeing in his
friend a beauty beyond that of earth. The sonnets had grown less
frequent when, a few years later, Michelangelo met Vittoria Colonna,
widowed poet and marchesa, one of the most distinguished women of
her time, honored by pope and emperor. Living much of the year in
convents and devoted to church reform, Vittoria was not to be
addressed with the sensuous fervor of the sonnets for Tommaso. Her
role was to correct and fortify his own soul by her example and to
direct his thoughts to the afterlife: he was beginning The Last
Judgment about the time that he met her.

His sculpture and painting,
rarely or never mentioned in earlier poetry, now become a source of
imagery for such sonnets as the four translated here.
In the more fanciful madrigal (241), he compares the
artist’s development to the evolution of the universe: since the
artist learns to do his best work (he says) only toward the close of
his life, and since nature has at last produced supreme beauty in the
unnamed Vittoria, it must mean that the earth is near its end.
When Vittoria died after a dozen years of friendship, there were no
more love poems for man or woman, Michelangelo’s focus turning to a
tormented but ardent colloquy with God.