Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/409

 We have seen that Michelangiolo's best verses were inspired by homosexual and pederastic-uranistic love. In his social and artistic life and career, Buonarroti never is interested clearly by a woman sexually. He was incapable psychically of such desire. But one or another young man was continually and successively taking the place of such "normal love" in the soul of the great sculptor and painter and architect. A pederastic emotion of the sort was his feeling for a beautiful boy of seventeen named Cecchino dei Bracchi. Cecchino was already the beloved of another noble Florentine. Luigi dei Ricci, of Buonarroti's social circle. But there was no rivalry between Michelangiolo and Ricci. One letter from Michelangiolo to Ricci, accompanying an ardent madrigal to Cecchino by the poet-sculptor, Michel Angelo tells Ricci could be "thrown into the fire—that is to say into that thing which consumes me." At the same time, Buonarroti recounts a strange dream of young Cecchino which has come to him. When Cecchino died suddenly, Buonarroti wrote a set of elegiac quatrains to his memory. (A sonnet penned after this grief is often cited.) The sentiment in Buonarroti for his handsome friend Tommaso Cavalieri, is recorded in several other Sonnets, including that which terminates with a play on the Italian word for "Knight"; a declaration that the writer "abides the captive of an armed knight." The colour of this intimacy with Cavalieri becomes more definite by their correspondence. Unfortunately representatives of the Buonarroti family have thought proper to suppress many of these letters, along with others, because of their homosexual tinge. Also uranistic was Michelangiolo's passion for Febo di Poggi, to whom he wrote many eloquent love-letters. Buonarroti never married. His sexual insensibility to woman influenced his want of artistic expressiveness as to the female figure and the female face. Buonarroti's feminine types are amazonian, androgynous beings; more like athletes than women, in their heavy contours. In one sonnet—numbered usually