He made thee light, and me the eyes of art;
Nor fails my soul to find God’s counterpart.

XXX.  Varchi, quoting this sonnet in his Lezione, conjectures that it was composed for Tommaso Cavalieri.

XXXI.  Varchi asserts without qualification that this sonnet was addressed to Tommaso Cavalieri.  The pun in the last line, Resto prigion d’un Cavalier armato, seems to me to decide the matter, though Signor Guasti and Signor Gotti both will have it that a woman must have been intended.  Michelangelo the younger has only left one line, the second, untouched in his rifacimento.  Instead of the last words he gives un cuor di virtu armato, being over-scrupulous for his great-uncle’s reputation.

XXXII.  Written at the foot of a letter addressed by Giuliano Bugiardini the painter, from Florence, to M.A. in Rome, August 5, 1532.  This then is probably the date of the composition.

XXXIV.  The metaphor of fire, flint, and mortar breaks down in the last line, where M.A. forgets that gold cannot strike a spark from stone.

XXXV.  Line 9 has the word Signor.  It is almost certain that where M.A. uses this word without further qualification in a love sonnet, he means his mistress.  I have sometimes translated it ‘heart’s lord’ or ‘loved lord,’ because I did not wish to merge the quaintness of this ancient Tuscan usage in the more commonplace ‘lady.’

XXXVI.  Line 3:  the lord, etc.  This again is the poet’s mistress.  The drift of the sonnet is this:  his soul can find no expression but through speech, and speech is too gross to utter the purity of his feeling.  His mistress again receives his tongue’s message with her ears; and thus there is an element of sensuality, false and alien to his intention, both in his complaint and in her acceptation of it.  The last line is a version of the proverb:  chi e avvezzo a dir bugie, non crede a nessuno.

XXXVII.  At the foot of the sonnet is written Mandato.  The two last lines play on the words signor and signoria.  To whom it was sent we do not know for certain; but we may conjecture Vittoria Colonna.

XXXIX.  The paper on which this sonnet is written has a memorandum with the date January 6, 1529.  ’On my return from Venice, I, Michelagniolo Buonarroti, found in the house about five loads of straw,’ etc.  It belongs therefore to the period of the siege of Florence, when M.A., as is well known, fled for a short space to Venice.  In line 12, I have translated il mie signiore, my lady.

XL.  No sonnet in the whole collection seems to have cost M.A. so much trouble as this.  Besides the two completed versions, which I have rendered, there are several scores of rejected or various readings for single lines in the MSS.  The Platonic doctrine of Anamnesis probably supplies the key to the thought which the poet attempted to work out.