Book description
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is universally celebrated as one of
the greatest artists of all time, yet iconic Renaissance creator was
also a prolific and gifted poet. The verses collected here are primarily
devoted to love and religion. Intense and passionate, the love poems
focus on two figures: Tommaso de Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna; with
the sonnets and madrigals dedicated to de Cavalieri revealing a highly
charged, homoerotic fervour - previously obscured in the original
versions. Michelangelo's later religious poetry moves away from his
earlier wordly concerns, while his letters provide a fasicnating insight
into his fanily relations and day-to-day life as a working artist. The
result is a revealing picture of one of the towering figures of the
Renaissance.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was one of the most inspired
creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo da Vinci, the most
potent force in the Italian High Renaissance. As a sculptor,
architect, painter, and poet, he exerted a tremendous influence on his
contemporaries and on subsequent Western art in general.
Anthony Mortimer was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at
the University of Lausanne and in 1994 Visiting Research Fellow at
Merton College, Oxford. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters
(1984-85) and has also directed the inter-university troisieme cycle
seminar for postgraduate students of English. He is a member of the
Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Anthony
Mortimer's major interests are in Shakespeare, poetry of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Anglo-Italian literary relations, and verse translation.
