verses, the less he liked or dared to edit them unaltered.  Some of them expressed thoughts and sentiments offensive to the Church.  In some the Florentine patriot spoke over-boldly.  Others exposed their author to misconstruction on the score of personal morality.[6] All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed and obscure in thought—­the rough-hewn blockings-out of poems rather than finished works of art, as it appeared to the scrupulous, decorous, elegant, and timorous Academician of a feebler age.  While pondering these difficulties, and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle course of reducing them to smoothness of diction, lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.[7] In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily describes his method, ’to change halves of lines, whole verses, ideas:  if he found a fragment, he completed it:  if brevity involved the thought in obscurity, he amplified:  if the obscurity seemed incurable, he amputated:  for superabundant wealth of conception he substituted vacuity; smoothed asperities; softened salient lights.’  The result was that a medley of garbled phrases, additions, alterations, and sophistications was foisted on the world as the veritable product of the mighty sculptor’s genius.  That Michelangelo meant well to his illustrious ancestor is certain.  That he took the greatest pains in executing his ungrateful and disastrous task is no less clear.[8] But the net result of his meddlesome benevolence has been that now for two centuries and a half the greatest genius of the Italian Renaissance has worn the ill-fitting disguise prepared for him by a literary ‘breeches-maker.’  In fact, Michael Angelo the poet suffered no less from his grandnephew than Michael Angelo the fresco painter from his follower Daniele da Volterra.

Nearly all Michael Angelo’s sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his sixtieth year.  To whom they were addressed, we only know in a few instances.  Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, the two most intimate friends of his old age in Rome, received from him some of the most pathetically beautiful of his love-poems.  But to suppose that either the one or the other was the object of more than a few well-authenticated sonnets would be hazardous.  Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshipped Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal.  This thought is repeated over and over again in his poetry; and if we bear in mind that he habitually regarded the loveliness of man or woman as a sign and symbol of eternal and immutable beauty, we shall feel it of less importance to discover who it was that prompted him to this or that poetic utterance.  That the loves of his youth were not so tranquil as those of his old age, appears not only from the regrets expressed in his religious verses, but also from one or two of the rare sonnets referable to his manhood.