Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/410

 as "LIII", Buonarroti deprecates the love of man for a woman, as compared with man's love for a male. It is not be forgotten that Michelangiolo's poetry and correspondence, especially in the English translations, has long been edited and adapted, by timorous Anglo-Saxons, so as to give the reader the impression that their passional quality was ever inspired by feminine loves. This dexterous travesty has only lately been discontinued. There are now faithful English versions obtainable, especially that superior one by J. A. Symonds. Symonds particularly clears away the old idea (on which have been written volumes of mis-statements) that Buonarroti's admiration and friendship with that elderly, learned lady, Vittoria Golonna was of a warmer hue; and that some of Buonarroti's sonnets were addressed to her, instead of to masculine objects. The sentiment from Buonarroti to the gifted Vittoria was unsexual—intellectual. The sculptor who carved the Young David, or the Torso in the Accademia in Florence, the famous Christ of the Santa Maria in Minerva at Rome, or he who painted the robustly naked males crowding the frescos of the Sistine Chapel, could not conceive of a Venus on canvas or in marble worthy of his immortality!

Buonarroti was not alone in his epoch in Italy as uranistic in nature. Raphael was a dionysian-uranian, turning psychically now to the male, now the female. Bazzi the Sienese, one of the most individualized of all the Renaissance painters, derived his nickname, "Sodoma" and sanctioned its use in public—at Siena—from his tastes and practices; being withal a superior and respected man, in spite of his eccentric life. Correggio, Bronzino and Guercino were uranistic. Benvenuto Cellini, in his famous "Autobiography," gives us many hints at his pederastic homosexualism; such as the episode of Cellini's sudden flight to Venice when accused of sodomy with his handsome studio-aid, Cencio; later, his