Tommaso de' Cavalieri

Tommaso dei Cavalieri (1509–1587) was an Italian nobleman, who was the object of the greatest expression of Michelangelo's love. Cavalieri was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. The young nobleman was exceptionally handsome, and his appearance seems to have fit the artist's notions of ideal masculine beauty, for Michelangelo described him as "light of our century, paragon of all the world." The two men remained lifelong friends, and Cavalieri was present at the artist's death.

Michelangelo dedicated approximately 30 of his total 300 poems to Cavalieri, which made them the artist's largest sequence of poems. Most were sonnets, although there were also madrigals and quatrains. The central theme of all of them was the artist's love for the young nobleman. Some modern commentators assert that the relationship was merely a Platonic affection, even suggesting that Michelangelo was seeking a surrogate son. However, their homoerotic nature was recognized in his own time, so that a decorous veil was drawn across them by his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, who published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds, the early British homosexual activist, undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.

The sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to his young friend by a good fifty years.

Examples include the sonnet G.260. Michelangelo re-iterates his neo-Platonic love for Cavalieri when in the first line of the sonnet he states "Love is not always a harsh and deadly sin."

In the sonnet G.41 Michelangelo states that Tommaso is all that can be. He represents pity, love and piety. This is seen in the third stanza:

One of the most famous of Michelangelo's poems is G.94, which is also called the "Silkworm." In the sonnet he wants to be garments to clothe the body of Cavalieri.

Michelangelo also sent Cavalieri four highly finished drawings, termed by Johannes Wilde presentation drawings. These were a new kind of drawing, completed works meant as presents, rather than sketches or studies. They, too, were greatly appreciated by Cavalieri, who was very sorry to lend some of them to members of the papal curia.Giorgio Vasari stood on their great originality. The meaning of the drawings is not fully understood, although it is common for scholars to relate them to moralizing themes or ideas about Neoplatonic love.

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