Gay drawings

That ardent lover was Michelangelowho described Cavalieri in these glowing drawings in gay letter from 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. 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. You can feel the dead weight of the horses, their blunt mass, as they gay.

On the ground, already in mourning for the doomed youth, his sisters are metamorphosing into poplar trees. In his grief, he transformed into a swan. And it is as a swan that Michelangelo portrays this bereft drawing. Other drawings he gave Cavalieri are much more obviously homoerotic to our eyes untrained in classical mythology.

It seems to be an obvious wish-fulfilment fantasy in which Michelangelo imagines he is the raptor-god drawing off the naked Tommaso in his talons. 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. Well, if we must rationalise, it symbolises the importance of the stone David is preparing to fire from his slingshot.

He depicts a male statue holding out a hugely distended right hand like that of David, in a shameful confession of masturbating. 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 gay body, acknowledges Condivi, but like the Greek sage Socrates his passion is chaste. Maybe it was, when he created David.

Michelangelo and the most sublime declarations of gay love in art

In spite of being a mortal sin and potentially a capital crime, encounters between males were far from unknown in the Renaissance. And there was a strong social assumption that such sexual encounters involved an age difference — as when the year old Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomising a 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.