Renaissance Rome · 1532
Michelangelo and Tommaso dei Cavalieri: sonnets with the pronouns changed
Dear reader,
In 1532, in Rome, Michelangelo met a young nobleman named Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Michelangelo was in his late fifties, the most celebrated artist alive. Tommaso was in his early twenties. Something in that meeting changed the old man.
He wrote him letters and sonnets, dozens of them, full of longing, fire and devotion. He gave him drawings made only for him, among them the myth of Ganymede, the beautiful youth carried up to the heavens by Zeus in the form of an eagle. The friendship lasted for the rest of Michelangelo’s life. Tommaso was with him in 1564, when he died.
In 1623, Michelangelo’s grandnephew published the poems for the first time. Before he did, he changed them. Where Michelangelo had written to a man, the published version addressed a woman. It took more than two centuries for readers to see the poems as they were written.
We keep thinking about that edit. Not a lie, exactly. Just a small correction to make love look the way it was expected to look. A pronoun here, a pronoun there.
The man who carved the most famous male body in history knew exactly where to look. Some of his readers, it seems, preferred not to.
Our prints are, in a way, the opposite of that edit. Nothing changed, nothing softened. The back as a landscape, lit at dawn.
With love, from the messenger,
Boté