Sex Life of Michelangelo

Michelangelo made religion sexy. That may not have been his initial aim, of course, but the way he portrayed the human form, and particularly the male form, was extremely beautiful. How did his devout Catholic faith create conflict with his well-known attraction to men? How was it expressed in his incredible artwork? And how was sexuality viewed in Renaissance Italy? Joining Kate today is historian and Michelangelo scholar at Stanford University, Sarah Prodan, to help us get to know this man better. You can find out more about Sarah's work here: https://www.sarahprodan.com/ This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:14Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Bertwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Bertwixt the Sheets. And I'm so glad that you are. But before we can be allowed to continue any further on our little journey together, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, book of adults, other adults, about adult things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And we call that the Fair Do's Warning, because, well, fair do's, we have told you it's a bit of a spicy one. If you keep listening and get upset, well, that's on you, quite frankly. Right, on with the show.

• 1:49Kate Lister?

  Walk lightly, Bertwixters. We do not want to draw attention to ourselves. It's 15:10, and I have snuck us into the Sistine Chapel to see how Michelangelo is getting on with this ceiling painting he's been banging on about.

• 2:07Kate Lister?

  And yet, to be fair, that is not half-bad, Mike. That is not bad at all. Well, that's my artistic review, anyway. But also, you would have to say that Catholicism has never looked quite this sexy. The creation of Adam's section looks like a scene from the local bathhouses. I'm not sure how he's managed it, but it's remarkable, sexy and pious all at the same time. But all of this has got me thinking about the man himself. What was Michelangelo's sexuality? How did he manage to square his sexuality with his faith? And what conflict arose out of that?

• 2:49Kate Lister?

  Not to mention everything else that was going on in his life while he was creating these masterpieces. Well, let's leave him to it and we'll do some more digging.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  What do you look for in a man?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Oh, money, of course.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Goodness, what beautiful time! Goodness has nothing to do with it, Darren.

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. Michelangelo was many things. He was a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a devout Catholic and a great big lovely gay Italian man. He was, we can just put any naysayers to bed with this one, he absolutely was. But how did his sexuality play a part in his life? Did it create conflict with his faith? He was intensely religious, you know. And how was all of this expressed in his many masterpieces? Taking us into this fascinating world of Renaissance Italy today is Michelangelo scholar Sarah Prodan to help us get to know this remarkable man a little bit better.

• 4:19Kate Lister?

  And if you're curious to know more about life in the Renaissance, then why not scroll back to our episode on Renaissance beauty standards? Some incredible and deadly things were being concocted back then. Right, paintbrushes and easels at the ready, everyone. Let's do this.

• 4:38Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sarah Prodan. How are you doing?

• 4:45Speaker 05

  Very well, thanks.

• 4:46Kate Lister?

  You? Oh, I'm beyond excited for today's topic. Michelangelo, I love this man. I love his art. But I couldn't claim to be a Michelangelo expert, so I'm so excited to speak to somebody who is. So what first brought you to Michelangelo's artwork? Do you remember when you first met him?

• 5:08Speaker 05

  I do. I actually first met Michelangelo in a concrete way through his poetry, believe it or not. In a course on love and sex in the Renaissance. So Michelangelo was first and foremost a poet to me. Obviously, he's a great artist and his art entered in the picture quickly thereafter. I cried the first time I saw the David in Florence. And so I've been very responsive to Michelangelo's art, but it was his words, it was his poetry that really drew me in. And his art for me came second. Yeah.

• 5:38Kate Lister?

  Wow. Now, you're saying Michelangelo and I'm saying Michelangelo. Is there a proper definition? Because I've recently found out that it's not Genghis Khan, it's Genghis Khan. So now I'm very open to... How is his name pronounced?

• 5:54Speaker 05

  No, it's pronounced in both ways. In Italian, it's Michelangelo. And I tend to favour also with the medici, I say medici, not medici, which is more of a North American, the medici. So yeah, I tend to follow the Italian accent. But there's Michelangelo, Michelangelo, they're both perfectly acceptable. Yeah.

• 6:10Kate Lister?

  One name, so he's very much like Cher and Madonna, just the one name will do it. What was his full name?

• 6:18Speaker 05

  So his full name is in fact very long. So Michelangelo is sort of one of these rare artists who actually had minor patrician roots. And so he's got a long name. His father's name was Lodo V. Di Leonardo di Buonarroti Simoni. So he had two last names. We have Buonarroti, which is his last name, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Simoni. So he, you know, he, he had a very, very long name. It was named ultimately Michelangelo Buonarroti.

• 6:45Kate Lister?

  My God, Sarah, you sound sexy when you say that. That, isn't Italian a sexy language, though?

• 6:51Speaker 05

  It's the language. Yeah, it's the language.

• 6:54Kate Lister?

  Okay, but we're gonna get to the sexy bit. So Michelangelo Buonarroti, known for his paintings, known for poetry. I don't think a lot of people would know much about where he came from. So before we get to what he personally liked and didn't like, what, where did he come from?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  Michelangelo is Florentine, technically born about 90 kilometers east of Florence, but Florence was a city-state and a republic. He was very much Florentine with roots in the city. His father was a magistrate in the town of Caprese when he was born. And so he was sort of raised in and around Florence. He had a wet nurse in the hills of Settignano. That's where he was sort of exposed to roots in sculpture. There were not artists in his family, historically, a family of merchants and bankers. So a lot of, a lot of legend, but also unique points of verifiable biography in the story of his, of his rise to, to sort of becoming an artist. But he was, he was apprenticed in Florence to a painter's workshop,

• 7:52Speaker 05

  the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio. And, but very much defined himself as a sculptor first and foremost. So he's known, obviously, for his masterworks at the Sistine Chapel, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and then the later Last Judgment that he did. But he, you know, he always called painting not his art. And in fact, it was in part a conspiracy by his competitors to, to have been forced into the role of painter that he would somehow fail. So he, he was first and foremost a sculptor in his own mind, in his training, his identification. And scarcely known as a poet for centuries. Many, in fact, don't know that he was a poet, but 302 poems, he was, he was quite prolific.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  He was. Imagine being so good at art that you could look at something Michelangelo painted, and he looks at himself and went, no, I'm better at other stuff. Like, that's how good he is. He would look at his painting. And think, oh, this is a conspiracy.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  It's this great age of genius. I mean, when you look back on it, it's really remarkable. If you think that, you know, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Florence, you know, crossing paths at the same time, then that concept of polymity of being, you know, multiply talented, you know, across different domains is really, you know, many explanations for why that was in the period, but being called upon to do and act across different domains is what cultivated that. So to be trained as a painter, but then to be asked to be an architect, right? Michelangelo was, at the end of his life, the last 17 years, he spent as chief architect for St. Peter's in Rome.

• 9:17Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  And so he was, you know, foreman and engineer and managing crews of 75 people. So, you know, this myth of the solitary artist was not really the case. And in fact, artists before Michelangelo's day, they really were artisans. This concept of the celebrity artist and artist as we understand it was really something that emerged from the Renaissance and grew through part of the mythmaking and repositioning of the production of art as a noble intellectual pursuit and not just a mechanical endeavor.

• 9:45Kate Lister?

  You'd have to change things after having Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci all knocking around at the same time. That's bound to change what you think of as an artist, isn't it? Did he train as an artist?

• 9:59Speaker 05

  He did.

• 10:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, did?

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was the training. So usually around the age of about 13, you know, you would, thereabouts, you know, you would sort of be apprenticed if you were going to be an artist. I mean, oftentimes the bottega where artists sort of worked, they were sort of connected to residences. So you had sort of artistic enterprises, usually based around families and training in families, but that was just obviously not the case for Michelangelo. He was sort of apprentice. So there were assistants, apprentices and masters in a given workshop and a house style. One learned by copying drawings from a master's book, for instance. So draftsmanship was part of the training as a painter, learning to mix pigments and things like this as well, and understanding how that was done. A lot of work like frescoes were collaborative endeavors. And so, yeah, there was sort of all of this training and Michelangelo sort of distinguished himself sort of quite early. You know, the

• 10:45Speaker 05

  story that he was observed creating the head of a fawn and, you know, garnered the interest of leaving patron. And Florence, the Medici, and then they sort of supported him in his career. And the reality of the story is that there were distant kinship ties between his family and the and the Medici family. And so it was a bit more of a probably a different explanation for how it was. He ended up apprenticed and trained. And then Michelangelo really worked for quite elite patrons. I mean, of the 13 popes that there were during his 89 years of life, he worked for nine of them.

• 11:16Kate Lister?

  I mean, that's running with the big leagues, isn't it? That really is.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  Quite remarkable. And so that came with opportunity and also constraint and adversity. I mean, you don't work in these environments and not have, you know, tremendous exposure, opportunity. In some sense, creative licenses, he as he as he got older, but also, you know, constraint. And he felt quite enslaved by the demands of patrons, a patronage based society. And that meant that issues of gratitude and reciprocity and and all of this were really quite important. And he could be quite touchy about these things.

• 11:45Kate Lister?

  So he grows up in Florence. Now, am I right in thinking Florence at the time, maybe it still does, has had a reputation for being, it was a bit of a wild place. It was sort of like maybe a bit more sexually permissive. I mean, is that completely wider than Mark? What was Florence like when when he was growing up?

• 12:05Speaker 05

  No, no, it's not. So, you know, Michelangelo, in those years, and he lived in the Medici family, was a very vital place sort of creatively. So I guess perhaps to before we explain why I may be describing what Florence was, I meant it was a city state. And, you know, Italy, of course, was was more of a cultural and sort of expression at the time as a concept than a geographical, when there were different city states, principalities, variation, local culture and language, dialects in Italy were their own, as they are, their own language. And so what you had in a city state like Florence in the north, it was centered on a mercantile economy, is you had a certain kind of economic vitality and you had a patronage of art, in part to legitimize power, in part also as a charitable act to give back for great wealth,

• 12:50Speaker 05

  tapped into sort of Christian ideas there. You had patrons of the arts. So this included literature. This included, you know, visual arts as we understand them and diving into philosophy. And of course, this was a moment of Renaissance. Called it a rebirth, Renaissance being a 19th century term. But it was a recovery of classical antiquity, the style and the ideas. And so that meant going back to examining culture of antiquity, which was in some ways centered on a certain kind of Socratic modes of engagement philosophically that mapped onto certain kind of social relationships based around the notion of pederasty. And so what you have in Florence, but not only Florence at the time, but well documented in Florence, is homoeroticism and homosexuality.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  And so you have both a permissive culture on this as well as a sort of repressive one. So it went by the term sodomy. There was offices of the night that persecuted these things. One could incur anything from fines to imprisonment to risk of death, depending on the circumstances. And this was sort of the legal status. But also there was a culture of idealizing male relationships. There was a homosocial culture of relationships between older and younger men as part of a way of sort of growing into culture, coming to understand power relations. And there were both, you know, sort of beautiful stories of longstanding relationships and also horrifying stories of rape and abuse of power.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  So, you know, all the things you might imagine tied up with questions of power and sex are very present in Florence. And there were contexts in which they were given expressive and artistic license, often because they were also mapped onto myth, you know. So for instance, to depict an erotic relationship between two individuals might, you know, not be permissive, but to tell a tale of Leda and the swan or Zeus or a mythological tale that involved these things was okay. So, you know, it was a question of who and when, under what context, things were discussed and where they operated. But yes, there was a high degree of artists being associated with homosexuality in the period. But socially speaking, it crosses the social spectrum.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  And people had many different fates before legal, the legal system and also, you know, perceptions of fellow Florentines.

• 15:04Kate Lister?

  When I was thinking and reading about the gay culture and the, not the same thing, but also this, this pedderistic culture that was happening at the time, I kind of thought that it sounds to me like, it's like, there's a parallel with like, modern drug culture, which is that at one point, there were laws against it, the office of the night was persecuting anybody that it accused of it. And there's this really, like, that's the official party lines, we're not supposed to be doing it, it's terrible and you'll get in trouble if you do. But also, there's this thriving subculture where it's very much an open secret, it is happening, people know all about it.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Exactly. That is absolutely the case. And then, you know, also the fact in some, in some cases of accusations, you know, the legal infrastructure is a really great way to sort of try and get rid of enemies, to introduce elements of scandal when you're vying for other things. So, you know, all the ways in which power plays out now was also true then.

• 15:55Kate Lister?

  Do we know anything about Michelangelo when he was growing up? Was he ever in one of these relationships as a young man, as a boy?

• 16:04Speaker 05

  So, we don't have documentation, you know, of Michelangelo's involvement. We do know that he had homoerotic longings and homo-social relationships, most definitely. And one young man by the name Gerardo, and of course, quips in the contemporary literature of the Gerardos around Michelangelo. But Michelangelo was one of these also incredibly devout Christians for most of his life. He was also quite, you know, oriented that way, quite susceptible to guilt. And so, you know, a contrast might be drawn and has been drawn between, say, Leonardo da Vinci, who was also known for these things, but did not seem to feel the same compunction, you know, to sort of hide it. Having said that, the great tale of homoerotic longing and love in Michelangelo's life actually takes place when he was considerably

• 16:47Speaker 05

  older. Michelangelo moved to Rome. He was back and forth between Rome and Florence between 1532, 1534, definitively moved to Florence, never to return again until after he was dead because of political situation in Florence. So he moved to Rome. And there was a beautiful Roman nobleman known for sophistication and refinement among the Patricia, also engaged in antiquarian culture. And Michelangelo became enamored with him. Tommaso di Caverrietti was his name. And so this was not a relationship that was engaged in physically to, for what we know, it operated and functioned very much as an open secret with intermediaries carrying documents and letters sort of back and forth. Tomaso, on his part, expressed great admiration for Michelangelo and his work and respect, you know, for the artist and the older sort

• 17:31Speaker 05

  of established artist that he was, Michelangelo enamored of the beauty that he described also as sort of spiritual, as a sort of an old soul that he saw in this Cavallier. He said there was a period defined as a courtship of a couple of years, some letters from Michelangelo, at occasion some of his most beautiful poetry, including idealizing poetry, you know, the stuff of the soul, but then translated into this friendship that lasted a lifetime. Tomaso da Cavallier was there on Michelangelo's deathbed.

• 17:57Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  So there's a lot in that relationship, beautiful polished gift drawings, erotic drawings, mythological in content, one of them, the rape of Ganymede, the bear that Zeus carried up. And so, yeah, I mean, the discussions of a sort of erotic art in Michelangelo ties to these ideas of the revival of antiquity, mythology, contemporary notions of sacred versus carnal love, and the ways in which that could be expressed. So Michelangelo tended to sublimate and idealize, which was an ideal of the cultural elite, you know, so trying to read between the lines, between what's expressed in literature and what was lived on the ground. But in Michelangelo's case, he was given to asceticism, to, like I said, to guilt, to living in a certain abstemious kind of a way. And so he was tended to sublimate.

• 18:41Kate Lister?

  It must have been so difficult for anybody who wasn't, you know, heterosexual, growing up in this environment where you've got these urges and you're growing up where clearly there are outlets for this, it's all around you, but also the church is completely condemning it. And you said that he was a man of great faith and he kept that all of his life. It must have been so conflicting for him.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was also conflicting culture. I mean, you could find, you know, in the character, the papacy changed with the character of the Pope and they worked all praise. I mean, this is a time, the Pope that brought Michelangelo to do the Sistine Temple's ceiling was known as the warrior Pope, Pope Julius II. And of course, temporal ruler expanding the people's states. And so, you know, a lot of anti clerical sentiment, the kind of things that gave rise to Protestantism and pushes both within and outside the Church for renewal, had to do with those kinds of contradictions within the papacy where sodomy could be practiced by certain individuals and without sort of being penalized. And there was, you know, great indulgence and lascivious things and accumulation of great

• 19:47Speaker 05

  wealth. And so, I mean, it was a time where we saw these contrasts. And so, you know, there were seasons of great repression and enforcement and seasons of much greater flexibility, even within Michelangelo's life in certain circles. And, you know, the death of the patron and the character that patron could change everything. You know, it wasn't it wasn't like the systems we have now. So, you know, the character of the local ruler, whether that was the Pope or a prince or a ruler who conducted himself like when, you know, the first citizens in a city like Florence, this really dictated. So, yes, of course, being conflicted probably with the urges one couldn't express. That would also have been true, you know, for women and other people in the period as well. There was greater freedom among the lower classes. I mean, you had in Italy at the time, a relatively

• 20:30Speaker 05

  pronounced urban culture, believe it or not, about 25% of people lived in cities, but even villages among the peasants were quite were sort of quite dense and society was hierarchical. So, yes, he would have absolutely. And his poetry really makes clear the ways in which he struggled with that. But also, the idea of struggling against any desire in the passions was something, you know, reason, the sense that it was submitted to reason in the periods, I guess, no matter what it was. One of the most beautiful lines from Michelangelo's poems, I think, plays on this about desire. And he uses the word to will, to desire volere, to wish, to want. And this is a theme that comes up in poetry, it comes up in religious culture, but he writes, "I wish I wanted my Lord what I do not want."

• 21:11Speaker 05

  And it's this concept of the divided will about wanting a thing you can't have or wanting you can't want or wishing you wanted something different. And you know, so what that experience is, and you know, it's an achingly profound poem that then turns into a mystical longing for, you know, kind of Christ. He characterizes himself as the mystic bride. And but it is very much about reconciling with, you know, the flesh and the spirit and with conflicting desires. And so this was rooted in the culture, commonly expressed in poetry, but poignantly so, and in a way that very much speaks to biography in Michelangelo's case.

• 21:44Kate Lister?

  Would he have been around at the, was it the bonfire of the vanities where that mad pope turned up and decided that everyone was a sinner and he was going to burn everything? What? He would have been there for that?

• 21:56Speaker 05

  This would have been Geraldo de Saba Nola, so known as Saba Nola. Yes, that's the guy.

• 22:01Kate Lister?

  The mad monk.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. So he had been a Dominican preacher in Florence, centered in a place of San Marco. And one of the interesting points emphasized in one of Michelangelo's biography by a contemporaries writing of him is how much the voice of that preacher echoed in Michelangelo's. He carried it forward, not only Michelangelo, because it was a call also. So this is a moment in history where events in nature, cataclysmic events, phenomenon of war, very much read through a religious paradigm, right? These were God's response to immorality in a city. And so challenges to say, say, to Florence was inevitably tied to the moral character of the people and the way that they lived. And so Saba Nola was someone advocating a certain kind of asceticism and

• 22:42Speaker 05

  advocating a theocratic state, actually, which he temporarily, after he ousted the manatees, got to sort of start. And so it was in that period during his reign, I mean, he was summarily gotten rid of and executed it publicly. And so Saba Nola was not around for long, but the apocalyptic fervor that was a part of his preaching was something that also appealed to, or had an impact rather, on Michelangelo. And so, yeah, millenarian concerns, concerns for the end of times, concerns, in this case of a scourge coming to bring about purification. This was also the world in which Michelangelo lived. Ironically, sodomy was persecuted less under Semonorella's reign than it had been under the Medici.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  So, I mean, we find all these interesting juxtapositions, you know, where the focus is. And so despite the rigors and the enforced rigors of a certain kind of morality, sodomy specifically, there were fewer cases during that particular window. But I suppose they were fighting battles on many moral fronts. And so that perhaps explains it.

• 23:43Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, one of the many sort of unexpected sort of coincidence of things.

• 23:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Absolutely. And you've mentioned that the Medici there, and I should probably just ask for anyone that's unfamiliar, who were the Medici? Like, they were Michelangelo's patrons, but what does that even mean?

• 24:00Speaker 05

  But what does that even mean exactly? So two things. So one about the family. So Florence, historically a republic in the context of city-state, in the context of early modern Italy. And this meant that it was run by groups of citizens. And so not everyone counted as, you know, as people. You had to be a member of the patriciate. There's this sort of longstanding thing that the Medici were one of the more powerful families historically in Florence that managed to consolidate power and so had become de facto rulers by the time Michelangelo's day through successive generations. And so Lorenzo de Medici, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, it was responsible for sort of maintaining a certain kind of political stability in Italy at the time, but allowed for the flourishing of culture and accumulating of wealth. And so they were great patrons, as anyone with great money was in the period.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  The distinction between the power of the family and the dignity of the state, where the political and the personal sort of merged, this became quite hard to parse out. And in the decades of Michelangelo's life, certainly in the wake of Lorenzo de Medici, there seemed to be this turn towards more of a princely, a sort of a discourse in the period of tyranny, and a prince versus a republic and sort of how that looks. Michelangelo was very partial to the traditional republican conception of Florence, to the point that when members of the Medici family also started to become popes in Rome, children of Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo grew up with also got positions in the papacy. There were two Medici popes. And so this family became quite powerful between Rome and Florence. And the center of the Renaissance moved to Rome during Michelangelo's lifetime, shortly before he did.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  And where I'm headed with this is that they were engaged in patronage in many different forms, and it was entangled also with questions of power. And so in this fascinating period between 1527 and 1530, where Florence had reverted back to a republic they'd ousted the Medici, Michelangelo was in Florence and he defended and participated in the fortifications of Florence to defend against the Medici. All of this while one of the Medici was Pope, Pope Clement VII in Rome. And when the Medici were restored, this Pope brought Michelangelo back to work on projects for the Medici in Florence. So there's this long story of, you know, what is loyalty and what is gratitude? And how do we sort of work together?

• 26:12Speaker 05

  But I mean, it also speaks to the importance of artists and certain kind of celebrity for also legitimizing power. So there was this case of mutual need, you know, asymmetry of power, obviously, but also a delicate balance. And so great art and the patronage of great art was fundamental to legitimizing power. And, you know, Michelangelo was central to many such projects in the period.

• 26:41Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Sarah and Michelangelo after this short break.

• 26:57Kate Lister?

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• 29:45Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about some of Michelangelo's work and then we'll get on to his poems because I think that that's probably a piece of evidence in the case that I'm going to make now, which is that I am quite confident saying that he was a gay man who was attracted to men, I think. And I think possibly the biggest piece of evidence you've got for that is his artwork. Look at his artwork. Like, it's just a boy bonanza. It's beautiful men. Even when he tries to do women, they end up as men with tits on. Maybe that's me being really harsh.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  No, it's you being very descriptive. I mean, it's an accurate description of what this has been commented on by many Michelangelo's figures, very masculine. There are a number of explanations for this. But, you know, the place of the body and the place of the nude, sort of in Renaissance culture is complicated because, of course, there were very strong religious ideas about these things, but also a variety of ways to think about this and to think sort of about the body. So, I mean, first and foremost, the body was a social signifier, sort of in the Renaissance. And so, how one decorated the body, what can be seen of a body, how one conducted gestures, the clothing one could wear, this was all determined by social status and rank. So, you know, it spoke to sort of community, to rank, to place in the system. And in that sense was sort of very, sort of very important.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  There were concepts, broader concepts of the body politic as well that mapped on to these ideas. And then there was a more personal component, I guess, if you will, of this composite self. I mean, in Michelangelo's world, in the Christian world, the body was composed of, or the individual, the person, personhood, implied a conjunction of body and soul. And so how the body related to the soul, proper uses of the body in light of the soul became very topical. And that brings us into the, I mean, philosophical, metaphysical sort of realm, but also religious. And so we sort of get both. And so there could be a championing sort of the body. So the athletic male nude, like Michelangelo's David, for instance, could convey heroism, it could convey courage, it could convey dignity. Beauty was a sign in Neoplatonic thinking revived at the time of virtue.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  And so, beauty and a beautiful body could signify the best of things. It was an ideal of sorts. But also, the nude body was a nude body. And so, for instance, Michelangelo did a nude Christ that's in the Church of Rome. That's ballsy, isn't it? In 1527. It was a tap. They ended up putting a loincloth over it because people found that indecorous. And so, it's been pretty persuasively argued that the way the nude was managed and the way erotica and various degrees of, you know, expressions of the body and of sex in the period were filtered and validated were through concepts of sort of obscenity. Honesty and dishonesty is the Italian word, but meaning obscenity and decency. And that this just went beyond whether a body was naked or not. It was, where was the body displayed? What was it signifying? Was it in a bedroom? And was it tied to themes

• 32:32Speaker 05

  of myth? And was it in service of conception and procreation, which was legalized by the Church? So there were these sanctioned areas for erotica and sort of nudity. And, you know, some of Michelangelo's drawings and artworks sort of veer into that area. Others, like the 20 nude figures that he included on the Sistine Dignities, right? These were also studies in the body. There were studies in anatomy. And in that sense, you know, there was also conceptions of the human body being dignified because humans were sort of at the center in this great chain of being. They brought together the divine, the great universe was replicated in the human form. And so, there was a dignity ascribed as well to the body and an interest in anatomy. It's not all to be condemned, but obviously, but

• 33:16Speaker 05

  it was commented on. But the masculine, definitely. We do have actually a beautiful drawing of a nude woman that Michelangelo had done. It's not that he couldn't draw a nude woman, but it didn't, it didn't appeal in his art. And there was a certain kind of heroism Michelangelo for the body was expressive of, obviously, of the psyche of other things. And so, how do you make a body express things that can't be articulated? Whether it's divine inspiration or, you know, struggle. So the model for that was the Laocoon. It was a sculpture described in Pliny's Natural History that was actually excavated in Rome in 1506. And Michelangelo got to be a part of that, got to be part of restoring it. And it's described as

• 33:57Speaker 05

  S curve as a way the the serpentine vision of the body that conveys torsion and tension also could be, you know, divine inspiration or erotic kind of longing. I mean, it can capture this intensity of emotion and and it's a form that shaped Michelangelo's art and expression of the body as well. And so, yeah, you know, size and musculature, these could be powerful conveyors of inner experience as well.

• 34:21Kate Lister?

  The Anunnadi fascinate me. I love them because like if you're looking at what he did on the Sistine Chapel, which is unbelievable that any human being could have done that. It's just in itself, it's incredible. But when I'm looking at it, I'm going like, he's made God buffed. That's quite a ballsy thing to have done as well. But like this, like these are biblical scenes and, you know, there's God and there's religion. And then there are the Anunnadi, who are just 20 beautiful naked twinks. They're not religious. And he's got one of them leaning on, is it acorns that look an awful lot like penises?

• 34:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot of fascinating things on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. So a couple of things about that, you know. Um, one, Michelangelo didn't, you know, come up with the entire program for the Sistine Chapel ceiling without theological consultants, right? So some of the imagery and the things that they could mean, they would have been.

• 35:13Kate Lister?

  They wouldn't have just let him just have at it.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  No, no, I mean, he had a lot of creative license, but not entirely. And so, you know, some of what reads to us, looking back, is obvious manifest, you know, expressions of of physical things. We're also had different signifies. They were read allegorically in the period. They signify sort of other things. So not only, the Anunnadi are part of this sort of artificial framework Michelangelo created sort of around the scenes. They occupy this liminal space between physical, not physical. So, you know, how do we sort of read these? But it's true, one of them, the hand dangles around near the buttocks of Adam and Michelangelo's can see Adam in a way that others of the point is really quite suggestive. So, I mean, it is there. But ambiguity in imagery and being able to interpret in the burden of interpretation, you know,

• 35:58Speaker 05

  the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as much as Prince of his work circulated widely and were influential and people came to see, it was, it was a rather educated, elite, restricted audience. That was also being catered to there. This is the chapel of cardinals. And so what enters into this is humanist culture and a play on wit. The idea of reading a thing on multiple levels, the idea of biblical allegory, a bit of creative play. So it's all of these elements of culture that go into the multiple layers of meaning. We get a literal level and then layers superimposed. And so in that, there was room for play and one could pretend that you were doing one thing and it signified another. But there is deep eroticism that's sort of manifest even there, even the temptation scene and the expulsion is another one of those scenes.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  So Michelangelo divided the scene into two parts. We've got, you know, Adam and Eve being expelled on the one side, the viewer's right, if you're sort of looking at. And he conflated the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. And to the left, we have Eve on the ground, Adam reaching above her to grab the fruit. It's Adam reaching for the fruit. The ways our bodies come together is suggestive, as I pointed out, of sort of phallaceous. So what is he indicating here is the sin and who's complicit in it and what does that mean? And, and you know, sexual sin, of course, stood for sin broadly, and it was about a certain kind of moral behavior and sex. But it was also on a more fundamental level, a turning away from God. It had less to do with the thing itself and more, it less to do with, you know, senses are bad or at large.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  And more, if God is not the center of how we relate to things, then we've fallen into sin. So it's a life orientation. It's not that the body and all expressions of sexuality were, were, were wrong. But it was about the right order of things and where God fit in, what the purpose was and who was the one doing it. So, you know, the, all of the complexity of these dimensions of Michelangelo's culture are readily identifiable. They come together in Sistine Chapel ceiling where we have these nods towards naughtiness and erotic behavior. And also an understanding of, of, you know, how the body can be subjected to and come to embody the spirit and raise one higher. So, yeah.

• 38:05Kate Lister?

  Isn't that crazy though, that he like put this, it's the Vatican, it's the Vatican, like, I just love the idea that, you know, that there's the spiritual and the temple and the bodily and all of it and the allegorical. But also, I just love the idea of him sitting there, just maybe having a little chuckle to himself at putting what is effectively a gay benamsa on the wall of the Vatican. Maybe he did that. That's far too reductive of me. But do we have any idea who were the models for like, who was the model for David? Was there a model for David that we know?

• 38:35Speaker 05

  That's a really great question. They tended to typically be men. If there was a specific model, I don't know. You know, the story of David is really quite, it's quite long. You know, Michelangelo has sort of inherited the block of stone that had sort of been worked by others and sort of how he went about producing that. It's sort of a fascinating story from the particular art history and contracts and patronage and then questions of decency and then also scale and what Michelangelo is trying to achieve there. The David has this large hand and sort of large head. It was originally meant to be, I don't know how many people know this, but actually one of many statues on top of the basilica in the Dutchman Florence. It was not originally meant to be in front of City Hall, where the replica now stands. And so, yes, great

• 39:17Speaker 05

  question of who the physical models were. I don't know. That may be known, but I don't know offhand specifically who that might have been.

• 39:25Kate Lister?

  Whilst you're here and we're talking about this stuff, I want to ask you, because I've asked this question of lots of people, why was the penis so small? What was that? Like, why, why would, was that an artistic choice that is made again and again and again? And Michelangelo makes it repeatedly. Like, what, why not do a regular sized one?

• 39:43Speaker 05

  That's a great question. When, perhaps the reasons of decorum, not to sort of emphasize it. In the case of the David, I think much of the sizing of those components were meant to cater to the viewing angle. And so how things would look to scale when viewed from a different, a different angle. So if you're viewing from below, it's questions of foreshortening and what you sort of, where you're going to be seeing something if you're viewing it from below and above, and then how the scale and the size of things look in the proportion, the relative proportion of them, depending on the viewing angle. So we've got sort of, in the case of the David, a 14 foot statue, which is large. But also, if it was to be viewed up above originally on a basilica, you know, that's a very different viewing angle. So things would have looked proportionately different viewed from that angle. But the emphasis

• 40:27Speaker 05

  on the head and the hand, for obvious reasons, of course, the biblical tale of David and Goliath and what's being emphasized there was first and foremost. But David also stood beyond basic courage and heroism as this certain divine character, also a symbol of republican Florence that was sort of being re-appropriated, you know? And so, yeah, different things were being emphasized. The face has leonine features.

• 40:51Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  You know, and the gaze even where it ended up being positioned. You know, it was committee that decided ultimately where to place this. Place this and it took forty men in four days to actually move this statue into place. They moved it on greased sort of logs, you know, it was this huge, you know, just even getting that statue there, but what it represented and sort of defence, it was meant to be a value of the common good, defence of the common good against would be tyrants within and without. So the penis was not central to that narrative, you know, would be another way to say that.

• 41:21Kate Lister?

  It wasn't important, but.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  You know, it really wasn't and it was in fact covered, you know, in Michelangelo's day, there was a crown and also a loincloth and a covering on the David as well. So for questions of decorum.

• 41:32Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Not unlike the manner which they were then later painted on just one of his nudes on the Last Testament, the sort of the painting behind the altar on the Sistine Chapel ceiling later for very different reasons. That's a different question of decorum and decency in terms of what Michelangelo painted there and the naked bodies and interesting poses. You know, it was there too, there's a one that gets pointed out of Saint Catherine leaning over her wheel, one of these saints is looking over her shoulder and of course that's been read as sort of, it looks like she's engaged in some kind of, for some viewers, sodomitic kind of activity with the person standing behind her. And so whether or not this was Michelangelo's intention, you know, this is what others have seen, you know, of course then as now, there is, there circulated this idea that, you know, what you've seen in

• 42:16Speaker 05

  a work of art has more to do with you than what the artist intended. And, you know, these ambiguity to draw these things out and to what extent was the kernel meant to be offered up so that you could become aware of your own sinfulness and get past it. But, you know, more practical minded or pragmatic thinkers among us and say, no, naked bodies are naked body and they told stories about this and, you know, but, you know, it really depended on the individual, you know, so I think Michelangelo really conceived dignity and sublimation in these things. But I think he was well aware of that and many others didn't.

• 42:50Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Sarah and Michelangelo after this short break.

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• 43:46Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera, demonic possessions, cursed mirrors, Bigfoot, poltergeists, exorcisms, near-death experiences, unsolved mysteries, missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 44:33Kate Lister?

  So let's talk about some of the loves of his life. We've sort of covered that he had these passions and things he found beautiful. And I think that most people agree now, that he was attracted to his own sex and da-da-da. But who did he love? You mentioned, was it Tommaso?

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Tommaso, yeah. Di Capri. So the ones that really influenced his poetry, and that we learn a lot about from his poetry, are Tommaso di Capri. And that was someone for whom he felt deep passion. And then a woman, very different kind of relationship that came after that occasioned his spiritual poetry and other things, a woman named Vittore Colonna. That was not a passionate love relationship, though historically it has been characterized that way. That was more of a relationship rooted in spiritual discourse and ideas about body and soul and the path to the divine. So that was very much a spiritual relationship, although idealism comes out in both Michelangelo's love poetry and in his spiritual poetry. Michelangelo had other friendships that were deeply important to him, including friends that helped revise his poetry throughout his life.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  These are documented in letters and in other things, but are not present in his poetry and are not necessarily reflected in his drawings. So for instance, Michelangelo rarely drew portraits, but he did do a portrait of a young man named Andrea Coratezi. So yeah, Michelangelo's loves come out in his art in that sense, but I would say that the prototypic and the one that's garnered the most attention, in part because of how it shaped his drawings and his poetry, but also for the impact it had on his life, was Tommaso de Caverdieri. I mean, I can share some of the verses and the things that he sort of wrote. Right, he's do, yeah. First, on the perils of love, in very early on, Michelangelo kind of writes about feeling sort of very bound and enslaved by these desires.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  So he writes, for instance, in one poem, "Who is this who leads me to you against my will? Alas, alas, alas, bound and confined, though I'm still free and loose. If you can chain others without a chain, and without hands or arms you've drawn me in, who will defend me from your beautiful face?" Oh, wow. So this wasn't for Tommaso, but this was how he experienced and wrote poetically about experiencing love. And so we're beyond poetic tropes. Michelangelo is quite insistent in picking up on this theme. But what he does write in a poem that seems to have been occasioned by his relationship with Tommaso is, "What I yearn for and learn from your fair face is poorly understood by mortal minds.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  Whoever wants to know it must die first." Wow. And so there's this idea that the beauty speaks to something far beyond that, so that whatever it is on the surface, it's not just that. It's something beyond that and it can lead beyond that. So he says, "I see in your beautiful face, my lord, what can scarcely be related in this life." My soul, although still clothed in its flesh, has already risen often with it to God. So yeah, he talks about rising up to God and holding death sweet. So this is the kind of spiritual dimension that sort of comes in this sort of divine component that he expresses in his poetry. Sublimation, you know, something he aspired to feel versus felt he used to say,

• 47:42Speaker 05

  but definitely speaks to his values and what he sought to experience, how he sought to contextualize or to contain or to honor what this individual gave rise to in him, what beauty gave rise to in him.

• 47:54Kate Lister?

  Do we know how Tommaso felt back? Is this a sort of a one-sided romance? Or was it reciprocated?

• 48:01Speaker 05

  Well, yes, I mean, in terms of romance, it was one-sided. But in terms of of respect and admiration, no. I mean, I think he, I mean, he did great admiration for Michelangelo as an artist, and they exchanged drawings that had a certain meaning, like I said, a myth of all of the faith and, but also, you know, when these drawings, it's clear that Michelangelo's helping Tommaso to learn how to draw. So there was an element of sort of intellectual engagement to things, to kind of training of an artist, that gift drawings and poetry also circulated in their circles. So it wasn't even that it was necessarily kept sort of between them. But there is a suggestion, it's one of Michelangelo's most beautiful poems, and some of Michelangelo's poetry is put to music in his day. This particular sonnet was not when a really, really beautiful, I think, one of his most

• 48:45Speaker 05

  beautiful lyric poems, but it ends with a nod towards only anger being able to untie and break a bond as strong as the one that they had. And this had to do with perhaps Michelangelo fearing that perhaps Tommaso, through the influence of others, perhaps maligning him, trying to suggest that maybe Michelangelo's attraction to him was anything less than noble. And so Michelangelo expressed concern sort of for this. He describes in a, in a letter, being overwhelmed, like falling into a sea by the things evoked in him by Caveretti, but at the same time, he speaks. To the nobility of Cavia di Sol. And so for Michelangelo was very important that it be read, whatever it was, that it be read and perceived by its recipient to know that his intentions with this were of the highest, that the love was of the highest

• 49:28Speaker 05

  order, however that was. So yeah, one of the most beautiful poems he actually drew on a passage in the Bible to convey this notion of inspired friendship.

• 49:35Kate Lister?

  Am I right in thinking that was it his great-grandnephew who translated his poems or published them and he changed the pronouns in it? So it sounded like he was writing to women?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, sort of it was. Yeah, there was a reworking in Michelangelo's poetry in the 1600s by his relative. And there was a changing of the pronouns and also cleaning up of some of the language for other reasons. You know, Michelangelo did undertake a project of publication for his own poetry. It never was published. So his poems circulated in manuscript form. You know, the nature of the publishing project, he sort of undertook, we don't really know. So Michelangelo did not publish in print his poetry in his lifetime. That did happen with his three-score nephew. And then Michelangelo's poetry, really the first critical edition we have is actually in the 1900s. So it circulated in sort of different ways. So, you know, there's a long and complicated history. Michelangelo's autograph folios, where you find his poetry, there are different variants. Sometimes they

• 50:27Speaker 05

  are juxtaposed with art and things he was working on. So into the study of how Michelangelo wrote poetry, what he was doing, he tended, much like the bodies of the Anubis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he tended to take an idea or a concept and draw it out in a lot of different forms. So he might take a concept of love, right? And then develop that idea in different contrasting ways in different, different poems. So it was part of the way his mind worked and the way he operated creatively as well. That explains this, the number of poems that he wrote. But in the case of the ones I've shared, they're read autobiographically because they are rooted and can be contextualized in the context of these, this relationship.

• 51:02Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, do you think that he ever managed to reconcile within himself, his desires and his spirituality? Because it must have, it must have been a torment for him to try and understand why he has these longing stuff. And he's writing poems saying, You know, that like, I can't remember exactly what it was, but like, I almost wish I didn't feel this way. Do you think he ever reconciled that within himself?

• 51:26Speaker 05

  A really tough question. The question with Michelangelo's death is he thought it was going to happen for decades before it did, because he lived to eight and nine, and much of the backup is his life and the poetry he composed. At that time, it became increasingly spiritual and for reasons of what was happening in the culture, but also the progression of the life, there was an archetypal kind of journey where you became focused on these things. But Michelangelo, in poetry, came to lament his art that he had put it before God. That as much as he lived as a pious artist and he conceived of his art and work that he did in service of the faith, that pursuit of glory, putting sort of invention and creative expression before attendance of the faith was something he sort of wrote about. And that he had to turn to Christ in the end of his life, and he did. He wrote Christ-centered poetry.

• 52:07Speaker 05

  We have these gorgeous, almost mystical drawings of Christ on the cross at the end of Michelangelo's life, that where he just works and reworks and keeps drawing, that's been shown almost like a meditative sort of meditation on Christ. So there was this incredibly devout phase at the end. Did he reconcile? I don't know. He writes of fearing the double death, which is once I die, and then condemn the death of the soul that follows the death of the body. This tormented him, but he did die supposedly, you know, from a fever, but ultimately in peace with the benefit of the sacraments and in the good graces, which mattered to him. Because for all of his sometimes progressive engagement with spiritual ideas, he was very much rooted to the practices of the church and the ideals. So did he reconcile them ultimately? I don't know.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Did he struggle to reconcile them in very intense ways? And did he give expression to this? Yes, quite anguished. So it's hard to tell, you know, how much, because to express one's anguish and regret as a way to expiate it was also part of devotional practice at the time. So to what extent did the anguish become more pronounced? Or was it just that his devotional engagement in trying to overcome these issues, express itself in a doubling down on how guilty he felt, you know, how much of it was in service of struggle? And how much of it was expressive of struggle? And how much of it was an indicator of his intense engagement and devotion processes aimed at a good death? But Sabona Rola spoke of always having death in mind, that fiery preacher, and it stuck with Michelangelo. He had a skull on the wall of his home to always keep death

• 53:37Speaker 05

  in mind when you could go. They always focused on the end. And so that very much shaped his final decades. And yeah, suggestion of a lot of guilt and a lot of regret about some of his choices in that time.

• 53:48Kate Lister?

  Sarah, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 53:55Speaker 05

  They can find me at sarahprodan.com or through my profile at Stanford University, where I am. And if they want to hear that beautiful poem that Michelangelo wrote, If One Chased Love, If One Sublime Compassion, they can also find that through my website. We put it to music. I did a piano and song. So if they want to learn more about Michelangelo, they want to hear that music, they can look there.

• 54:17Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for talking to me. I've enjoyed every second of it.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Me too. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

• 54:29Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening. And thanks so much to Sarah for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review, and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just fancied saying hi, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we've got episodes on the dark history of London's drug world, and a new mini-series on the real wives of dictators, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 55:16Speaker 07

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  We're talking ghosts caught on camera.

• 55:32Speaker 07

  Demonic possessions.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Cursed mirrors.

• 55:34Speaker 07

  Bigfoot.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Poltergeist.

• 55:35Speaker 07

  Exorcisms.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Near death experiences.

• 55:37Speaker 07

  Unsolved mysteries.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Missing persons.

• 55:40Speaker 07

  Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.