His book of poems is filled with an unspeakable longing for the perfection of earthly beauty and for eternity; and his beloved mistress is the sole symbol of this metaphysical climax.  Earthly beauty is but an imperfect semblance of the divine beauty, the embodiment of which is his love.  We meet all the familiar motives; he is nothing before her; he is unworthy of existence; he is like the moon receiving her light from the sun; love has raised him from his base condition and is teaching him the futility of all he had hitherto valued.

Yea, well I see what folly ’twere to think
That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven
Could ever be paid by work so frail as mine.

(Transl. by J.A.  SYMONDS.)

And of love he says: 

From loftiest stars shoots down a radiance all their own,
Drawing the soul above,
And such, we say, is love.

(Transl. by HARFORD.)

His poems, which would proclaim him a great poet if he were not an even greater sculptor, breathe an emotion unsurpassed in its intensity.  They reveal to us in an almost unique manner the emotional process which culminated in the deification of the beloved.  If we did not know that Vittoria Colonna was an historical individual, not much younger than Michelangelo himself, and (if we are to credit her portrait) a very plain woman with a large masculine nose, we might be tempted to believe her to be a mythical personage like Beatrice Portinari, or Margaret in Faust.  But the conviction that all true perfection was centred only in her, now faced his art and threw its terrible shadow over it.

“Michelangelo conceived love in the Platonic sense,” wrote his friend and biographer, Condivi; but this is only a part of the truth.  In the heart of Michelangelo there took place the tremendous reconciliation between the Greek cult of beauty and the religion of the beyond; he blended the finest blossom of Hellenism with the profoundest spirit of Christianity; he sublimated Plato and Dante into a higher intuition; the eroico furore of his contemporary, Giordano, had found an embodiment.  The two great rays which illuminated his life:  the perfect earthly beauty to which destiny had called him, and the boundless religious longing, the last fundamental force of his soul, converged in the glorified woman.  Vittoria appeared to him as the solution of the world-discord, a solution which he had no right to expect, a miracle.  She was the greatest experience of his great life, an experience which almost broke him.  More than once the thought of Vittoria filled him with sudden dread.  In her he had seen God and the world in one.  The powerful effect of this on so self-reliant a character, a man who had been unable to find much sympathy with patrons and friends, to whom women had meant nothing, may easily be imagined.  All at once he had found a centre, and more than that—­a solution of all the discords of life, of the eternal dualism of the earthly and the divine.  His love was not the love of a youth stretching out feelers to the world beyond, but the final creed of a lonely life which had known nothing but beauty and divinity.  With the passion characteristic of him, he threw himself into this new experience and made it his fate, flinging world and art aside.  Before Vittoria he ceased to be a sculptor and became a worshipper.