Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was born at Caprese in Tuscany and trained in Florence. He is remembered above all as a sculptor, painter and architect, of the David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the dome of St Peter’s, but he also wrote poetry throughout his long life, working at madrigals and sonnets in the Tuscan tradition of Dante and Petrarch.

His surviving verse, about three hundred poems, was not published as a book in his lifetime. It speaks of beauty, love and art, of his friendships with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, and, in old age, of death and the longing for God. This selection is John Addington Symonds’s rhymed English version of 1878; where Michelangelo left two versions of a sonnet, both are given.