Michelangelo and the most sublime declarations of gay love in art – The Guardian

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was the light of the age, unique in the world – at least in the eyes of the man who loved him. That ardent lover was Michelangelo, who described Cavalieri in these glowing words in a letter from 1532. If only a portrait of Tommaso survived we could have seen his face, which the fiftysomething artist claimed in a poem was so beautiful it gave him a glimpse of paradise itself.

Michelangelo did not just announce his love for this young upper-class citizen of Rome – who knew the pope and prominent cardinals socially – in verse and prose. He also gave Cavalieri some of the greatest drawings ever created. Up until this time, the mighty sculptor, painter and architect had used drawing as a tool to develop ideas: but the so-called “Presentation Drawings” he did for Tommaso aspire to be completed works of art. They star in the British Museum’s new exhibition of Michelangelo’s later graphic works, and demand a close look, for these are perhaps the most sublime declarations of gay love in art.

That may not be instantly obvious when you look at Michelangelo’s The Fall of Phaeton, from the BM’s own Michelangelo collection. It illustrates a Greek myth, retold by the Roman poet Ovid, of the overconfident youth Phaeton who has borrowed the flying chariot in which his father, the sun god, crosses the sky from dawn to dusk. He’s lost control of the horses so Jupiter, to stop his fiery chariot from burning the earth to a crisp, has struck him down. This is a sculptor’s drawing. You can feel the dead weight of the horses, their blunt mass, as they plummet. Phaeton’s naked upturned body dangles in freefall. On the ground, already in mourning for the doomed youth, his sisters are metamorphosing into poplar trees. There’s a male mourner, too: Cycnus who, as Ovid tells it, loved him and was devastated by his death. In his grief, he transformed into a swan. And it is as a swan that Michelangelo portrays this bereft lover.

Other drawings he gave Cavalieri are much more obviously homoerotic to our eyes untrained in classical mythology. In The Punishment of Tityus, an eagle pecks at a man’s naked form. It is a scene of torment, but it’s clear Michelangelo finds pleasure in this pain: the eagle rests on top of Tityus like a lover, and the nude man’s body is tilted to ensure a clear view of his genitals. Instead of a gory depiction of exposed entrails as other artists have pictured it, Michelangelo feasts his and Tommaso’s eyes on a softly shaded, lusciously sensual encounter.

In another of these works, which survives in copies, Michelangelo depicted the god Jupiter taking the form of an eagle to carry off Ganymede, a myth with unavoidable “sodomitical” implications. It seems to be an obvious wish-fulfilment fantasy in which Michelangelo imagines he is the raptor-god carrying off the naked Tommaso in his talons. But there’s a killer detail. Most Renaissance artists depicted Ganymede as pre-pubescent. Michelangelo makes him a young man. He does that to assert the nobility of true love between men.

His declaration of such a love is the triumphant conclusion of a lifelong struggle. You can see it 20 years earlier in the right hand of David, its veins like cables as it tenses, fingers wrapped round a stone. David seethes with contradictions and that hand is famously out of scale, enlarged compared with the rest of him. Why? Well, if we must rationalise, it symbolises the importance of the stone David is preparing to fire from his slingshot. But Salvador Dalí in his painting The Lugubrious Game offers another explanation. He depicts a male statue holding out a hugely distended right hand like that of David, in a shameful confession of masturbating. If you stand below Michelangelo’s sculpture in the Accademia Gallery, Florence, the right hand of David actually does look Dalinian, close to his lofty groin.

Among its many meanings, David is partly about sex. Michelangelo is working out, consciously and unconsciously, the nature of his desires. The tittle-tattle about these desires bothered him so much that he got his biographer Ascanio Condivi to offer a philosophical explanation. Michelangelo does love the male body, acknowledges Condivi, but like the Greek sage Socrates his passion is chaste.

Maybe it was, when he created David. Despite writing many love poems, about women and men, and lavishing chalk and ink on drawing naked male models, there’s no record of him having a relationship with anyone before he suddenly declared his passion for Cavalieri. The surreal right hand of David may confess to a lonely man’s consolation.

The “Giant”, as it was nicknamed, also shows him working out his own ethics of love. In spite of being a mortal sin and potentially a capital crime, encounters between males were far from unknown in the Renaissance. In Michelangelo’s city-state Florence, the high level of recorded accusations imply many men were having sex with other males before having families – this wasn’t an identity so much as a rite of passage. And there was a strong social assumption that such sexual encounters involved an age difference – as when the 24-year old Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomising a 17-year old.

The biblical hero David was usually portrayed as an adolescent, yet Michelangelo made him an adult, pre-empting the transformation he would give to Ganymede as he declared his love for Cavalieri. There was nothing secret about these feelings. His poems were widely circulated in manuscript and even performed as songs. Cavalieri was so pleased with the erotic drawings he showed them to the pope – who was impressed.

Michelangelo could risk this Renaissance coming out partly because artists were regarded as special and different, their genius liberating them from conventional behaviour. As Michelangelo was thought the greatest of them all, why should he not have licence?

He also had the cover of Neoplatonism, which Condivi would later deploy to assert Michelangelo’s chastity. The Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino defined “Platonic love” as a lofty desire that leads us from pleasure in someone’s shape (like an Ed Sheeran song) to contemplation of spiritual truth. Michelangelo’s poems to Cavalieri insist he loves him in this way. And yet they go far beyond simply using pop philosophy to cover forbidden impulses. Michelangelo is a great love poet. In these, his most impassioned, complex verses, he genuinely tries to understand how physical desire relates to the more mysterious feeling we call “love”.

“It must have been your eyes,” he writes in a movingly realistic image of falling for Tommaso. Not “it was your eyes”: we get the sense he’s still trying to understand how he fell so intensely in love. But he is sure it is a love that helps him see heaven itself. Let the base rabble gossip all they like, he says in one poem: his emotion is pure. In a letter he puts the same belief into prose: “I’ll forget your name when I forget to eat food, except your name means more than food because that only feeds my body, but you feed body and soul.”

Body and soul: for Michelangelo love is about their union. And yet this is no easy synthesis. However much he tries to sublimate physical passion it keeps plaguing him with fantasies and pain. He imagines Tommaso, in lines that play on the equestrian surname Cavalieri, as a forceful knight who ties him up: “And if I need to be conquered, a captive, to be in bliss, it’s no wonder, naked and alone, I remain the prisoner of an armed cavalier.”

This is not a passing image. Michelangelo set it in stone. While in love with Tommaso he carved, from 1532-4, his sculpture Victory. It portrays a young man who has conquered and subdued an older one. The naked victor straddles his older prisoner – bearded like Michelangelo – who humbly accepts his fate. At some point Michelangelo was defeated, perhaps by whispers and malign interpretations of his conduct. Tommaso would marry, taking a wife from an established Roman elite family.

Whatever the physical basis of their relationship – and who hasn’t tried to fathom how our feelings flit between mind and body? – it was love: as joy, as pain, as a glimpse of the infinite. Through word and image Michelangelo made it universal. When Michelangelo died, aged 88, in 1564, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was at his bedside.

• Michelangelo: The Last Decades is at the British Museum from 2 May until 28 July.

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