section_path: Personal life/Relationships and poetry
section_name: Relationships and poetry
paragraph_text: Relationships and poetry
  
  Love for a lady's different. Not much in that for a wise and virile lover's trouble.
  
  It is impossible to know whether Michelangelo had any physical relationships. Understanding about his sexuality is rooted in his art, especially his poetry. He wrote more than three hundred sonnets and madrigals. About sixty are addressed to men — "the first significant modern corpus of love poetry from one man to another".
  
  The longest sequence, displaying deep loving feeling, was written to the young Roman patrician Tommaso dei Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo first met him in 1532, at the age of 57. In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari observed: "But infinitely more than any of the others he loved M. Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman gentleman, for whom, being a young man and much inclined to these arts, made, to the end that he might learn to draw, many most superb drawings of divinely beautiful heads, designed in black and red chalk; and then he drew for him a Ganymede rapt to Heaven by Jove's Eagle, a Tityus with the Vulture devouring his heart, the Chariot of the Sun falling with Phaëthon into the Po, and a Bacchanal of children, which are all in themselves most rare things, and drawings the like of which have never been seen." Some scholars downplay the relationship between Michelangelo and Cavalieri as one of platonic friendship. The poems to Cavalieri make up the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another; they predate by 50 years Shakespeare 's sonnets to the fair youth:
  
  I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill; A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill Which without motion moves every balance.
  
  Cavalieri replied: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours." Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo until his death.
  
  In 1542, Michelangelo met Cecchino dei Bracci who died only a year later, inspiring Michelangelo to write 48 funeral epigrams. Some of the objects of Michelangelo's affections, and subjects of his poetry, took advantage of him: the model Febo di Poggio asked for money in response to a love-poem, and a second model, Gherardo Perini, shamelessly stole from him.
  
  The nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed; he also removed words or in other instances insisted that Michelangelo's poems be read allegorically and philosophically, a judgment some modern scholars still repeat today. It was not until John Addington Symonds translated the poems into English in 1893 that the original genders were restored. Since then it has become more accepted that his poems should be understood at face value, that is, as indicating his personal feelings and a preference by him for young men over women.
  
  Late in life, Michelangelo nurtured a friendship with the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died. These sonnets mostly deal with the spiritual issues that occupied them. Condivi, who in his biography was preoccupied with downplaying Michelangelo's attraction to men, alleged Michelangelo said his sole regret in life was that he did not kiss the widow's face in the same manner that he had her hand.