Michelangelo

            Michelangelo (1475-1564), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet whose artistic accomplishments exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent European art. Michelangelo considered the male nude to be the foremost subject in art, and he explored its range of movement and expression in every medium. Even his architecture has a human aspect to it, in which a door, window, or support may refer to the face or body, or the position of architectural elements may suggest muscular tension. The greatest artist of the human figure was also one of Renaissance Italy's greatest poets. Observing the originals' meters and rhyming, though not always according to the original schemes, Nims' translations allow us to appreciate that greatness. Like other Renaissance poets, Michelangelo wrote primarily of love. Like Shakespeare, Michelangelo loved both men and women and both spiritually "fair" and "dark" ladies. Unlike Shakespeare, he specified who the men and the fair lady were, though not who "the lady beautiful and cruel" was. That this great artist represents himself as unworthy of his loves and frustrated by his inadequacies (many of them having to do with his age, for these are poems written mostly in his 60s and later to much younger beloveds) is conventional--other sonneteers and madrigalists of the time voiced similar sentiments--yet as Nims' accompanying text makes clear, it is also psychologically accurate. Those still hankering, after The Agony and the Ecstasy and several biographies, to know what the greatest Western artist "was like" should turn to these poems.
             Michelangelo continually sought challenge, whether physical, artistic, or intellectual .
             He favored media that required hard physical labor "marble carving and fresco painting. In painting figures, he chose poses that were especially difficult to draw. And he gave his works several layers of meaning, by including multiple references to mythology, religion, and other subjects.