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Sonnets of Michelangelo
Originally written as letters, Michelangelo's vehement and energetic sonnets range from formal expressions of thanks to passionate arguments as they flatter patrons, address lovers, cry out to God, and reflect on art and metaphysics.
110 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1623
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About the author
Michelangelo Buonarroti
324 books144 followersMichelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance period who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered as the greatest living artist in his lifetime, he has since been held as one of the greatest artists of all time. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 2, 2020
Just the fact that the great sculptor and painter ALSO wrote poetry .... yeah
No wonder he was so grumpy everyone wanted in his pants
No wonder he was so grumpy everyone wanted in his pants
May 24, 2014
Michelangelo has been one of my favorite artists for many years. I've seen a few of his works in person. The David in Florence literally took my breath away: I still remember turning the corner in the Accademia and seeing it at the end of the hallway and just not being able to believe it. The Pieta in the Vatican brought tears to me eyes. I always feel Michelangelo's emotion and what he put into his statues. I enjoy his painting too (I mean, come on, the Sistine Ceiling? The Last Judgment? There are no words), but his sculpture is my favorite, probably because it was his favorite.
I didn't know he wrote sonnets until my dad brought this book home for me, and when I saw it, I couldn't wait to read it. The obvious comparison for me is to Shakespeare's sonnets, and oddly enough, Michelangelo died just a few months before Shakespeare was born. Michelangelo's sonnets are Petrarchan, though, which makes sense, but I feel like Shakespeare read Michelangelo's at some point. The themes are so similar: love, temporal beauty, the sun, lightness and darkness... The autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's sonnets is still debated, though, whereas it's obvious that Michelangelo was writing about himself. First of all, many of the sonnets are dedicated to actual contemporaries of his. Second of all, they're like his sculptures: "troubled, romantic" (to quote Oscar Wilde), emanating the sense that they were carved from something, not created but freed, contrary, and filled with agony and ecstasy (to borrow from Irving Stone).
I feel like I know Michelangelo better than I did before, but if you only ever look at his art, you'll understand the man. As indicated in his sonnets, he is the man that he frees from the marble every single time. He's tortured and locked within himself, struggling to break out. He gets close but never quite attains what he wants to (which is the subject of the introduction in my edition by Michael Ayrton).
My favorite sonnets are 27, 32, 54-60, and the last few in the 70s. Highly recommended. Obviously.
I didn't know he wrote sonnets until my dad brought this book home for me, and when I saw it, I couldn't wait to read it. The obvious comparison for me is to Shakespeare's sonnets, and oddly enough, Michelangelo died just a few months before Shakespeare was born. Michelangelo's sonnets are Petrarchan, though, which makes sense, but I feel like Shakespeare read Michelangelo's at some point. The themes are so similar: love, temporal beauty, the sun, lightness and darkness... The autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's sonnets is still debated, though, whereas it's obvious that Michelangelo was writing about himself. First of all, many of the sonnets are dedicated to actual contemporaries of his. Second of all, they're like his sculptures: "troubled, romantic" (to quote Oscar Wilde), emanating the sense that they were carved from something, not created but freed, contrary, and filled with agony and ecstasy (to borrow from Irving Stone).
I feel like I know Michelangelo better than I did before, but if you only ever look at his art, you'll understand the man. As indicated in his sonnets, he is the man that he frees from the marble every single time. He's tortured and locked within himself, struggling to break out. He gets close but never quite attains what he wants to (which is the subject of the introduction in my edition by Michael Ayrton).
My favorite sonnets are 27, 32, 54-60, and the last few in the 70s. Highly recommended. Obviously.
June 25, 2024
Siroti Mikelanđelo se celog života pravdao nekome i isterivao pravdu. Mada, za razliku od većine svojih savremenika nije umro ni siromašan, ni prognan, ni zaboravljen. Naprotiv.
Iskreno, nisam ništa očekivao od ovih soneta, jer nisam na početku čitanja ništa znao o njegovom životu, te sam morao da zastanem, pročitam prvo biografiju koju je njegov učenik Vazari napisao, a onda i Mikelanđelova pisma, ne bih li mogao da ispratim objašnjenja koja idu uz sonete.
Nažalost, nisam ih čitao u originalu zbog nepoznavanja italijanskog, te ne znam da li je prevod zaslužan za moje nedoumice, ali ne bi trebalo, budući da je Deloroko jedan od vrsnih prevodilaca hrvatskih kome je među prvima pripala čast da prevede delove Danteovog Raja tamo gde je Kombol stao.
Elem, konfuzan mi je Mikelanđelov izraz. Tok misli je nasumičan i neposložen i metafore nekako nevešte a izraz petrarkovski hladan. Iz biografije saznajem da je vrlo cenio Dantea. Nisam baš primetio da je bio inspirisan Danteovim stilom. Pre Petrarkom koji na isti način bludi i pravi koprenu nedodirljivosti oko sebe dok se obraća Amoru. Lepo je, ipak, što je Danteu posvetio dva soneta koji me nisu impresionirali posebno.
Emocije koje iznosi su mu u potpunim ekstremima, ambivalenciji i poput nekog klatna su koje se stalno njiše iz crvene u zelenu zonu. Dualan je kao bog Janus. Ili je strasno zaljubljen u kamen (što najlepše pretače u rime) ili u mladost i lepotu mušku i žensku (odbijam da prihvatam homoerotične elemente kojih ima onoliko u rimama posvećenim prijatelju Tomazu Kavalieriju) ili u ljubav prema ženi koja ga odbija (pesnikinja Vitorija Kolona).
Na posletku, ono što mi se jedino istinski svidelo jesu njegove rime kroz koje provejava meditatio mortis i u kojima razgovara sa Smrću svestan potpuno da će ubrzo da siđe kod starog Harona.
Saznanje da je Mikelanđelo prevođen na ovim prostorima je jedno pozitivno iskustvo, i jedino mi je krivo što nisam sposoban da sve ponovo u originalu pročitam, jer bih sigurno drugačije doživeo. Mada... ko zna, jednog dana, možda...
Iskreno, nisam ništa očekivao od ovih soneta, jer nisam na početku čitanja ništa znao o njegovom životu, te sam morao da zastanem, pročitam prvo biografiju koju je njegov učenik Vazari napisao, a onda i Mikelanđelova pisma, ne bih li mogao da ispratim objašnjenja koja idu uz sonete.
Nažalost, nisam ih čitao u originalu zbog nepoznavanja italijanskog, te ne znam da li je prevod zaslužan za moje nedoumice, ali ne bi trebalo, budući da je Deloroko jedan od vrsnih prevodilaca hrvatskih kome je među prvima pripala čast da prevede delove Danteovog Raja tamo gde je Kombol stao.
Elem, konfuzan mi je Mikelanđelov izraz. Tok misli je nasumičan i neposložen i metafore nekako nevešte a izraz petrarkovski hladan. Iz biografije saznajem da je vrlo cenio Dantea. Nisam baš primetio da je bio inspirisan Danteovim stilom. Pre Petrarkom koji na isti način bludi i pravi koprenu nedodirljivosti oko sebe dok se obraća Amoru. Lepo je, ipak, što je Danteu posvetio dva soneta koji me nisu impresionirali posebno.
Emocije koje iznosi su mu u potpunim ekstremima, ambivalenciji i poput nekog klatna su koje se stalno njiše iz crvene u zelenu zonu. Dualan je kao bog Janus. Ili je strasno zaljubljen u kamen (što najlepše pretače u rime) ili u mladost i lepotu mušku i žensku (odbijam da prihvatam homoerotične elemente kojih ima onoliko u rimama posvećenim prijatelju Tomazu Kavalieriju) ili u ljubav prema ženi koja ga odbija (pesnikinja Vitorija Kolona).
Na posletku, ono što mi se jedino istinski svidelo jesu njegove rime kroz koje provejava meditatio mortis i u kojima razgovara sa Smrću svestan potpuno da će ubrzo da siđe kod starog Harona.
Saznanje da je Mikelanđelo prevođen na ovim prostorima je jedno pozitivno iskustvo, i jedino mi je krivo što nisam sposoban da sve ponovo u originalu pročitam, jer bih sigurno drugačije doživeo. Mada... ko zna, jednog dana, možda...
Read
August 24, 2023If it weren’t for a deep reading of Wilde’s ‘Dorian Gray’, these sonnets would’ve surely continued to fly under my radar. By the very nature of translation, some beauty has been lost to us, but still so much of Michelangelo’s heart & soul remain.
By no means a poetic genius, I still found these sonnets to be skillfully written & lovingly crafted by a man who surely felt a wide range of emotions very deeply. Worth the perusal for the curious & poetic threads in us all.
By no means a poetic genius, I still found these sonnets to be skillfully written & lovingly crafted by a man who surely felt a wide range of emotions very deeply. Worth the perusal for the curious & poetic threads in us all.
October 3, 2023
It is truly beautiful to read, if of course you can understand what the author is saying
May 22, 2013
Michael Angelo Buonarroti, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo (Gramercy Publishing, 1948)
It is (or it should be) a truism that one cannot review a translated book of poetry as a book of poetry; one must review it as a translation. So I'm not really reviewing The Sonnets of Michael Angelo, I'm reviewing John Addington Symonds' translation of said sonnets. After all—especially in a book that is not presented bilingually, with the originals on one page and the translations facing—it's difficult to know how faithful the translations are, whether for example the occasional awkwardness of phrasing lies with Buonarroti (yes, by the way, in case you were wondering—the painter/sculptor/inspiration for the term “Renaissance man”, and no, I had no idea he was a poet either before stumbling upon this at a used book sale) or with Symonds. (Of course, while reading it, I had a perfect example of this and was too stupid to jot a note down so I could quote the couplet that struck me.) For the most part, if you're used to the sixteenth-century sonnet, there's not a great deal here that's going to surprise you vis-a-vis the construction, for example:
“As one who will re-seek her home of light,
They form immortal to this prison-house
Descended, like an angel piteous,
To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright.”
(--from “Heaven-Born Beauty (First Reading)”)
(And actually, “an angel piteous” is an example, however weak, of the awkwardness I was talking about above.)
It's not awful stuff, but Buonarroti was definitely more involved in other arts, and honed them to a much finer point than he did his poetry; Symonds notes in his afterword that Buonarroti “seems to have entertained no thought of printing his poems in his lifetime” (58), and goes on to say both that “Nearly all Michael Angelo's sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his sixtieth year” (59), which comes a couple of paragraphs after “All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed and obscure in thought—the rough-hewn blockings—out of poems rather than finished works of art.” (59), which he tells us while explaining why his descendant and biographer Ascanio Condivi revised them before publication (Symonds' translation, he tells us, is from the originals first published in 1863, and “adheres to the original orthography of Michael Angelo, and omits no fragment of his indubitable compositions.”[58]). Now perhaps I'm wrong in this, but I put those things together and the conclusion I arrives at is “poetry was a hobby for Buonarroti, not a profession.” And that's all well and good; there is absolutely no reason why Buonarroti, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn't dabble in the odd bit of doggerel now and then. But if you go into this book expecting the Sistine Chapel of verse, you may find yourself disappointed. **
[and while researching this, for those of you reading this where I can add outside links, I find that a bilingual version of the Symonds translation has in fact not only been published, but is freely available at Google Books in both PDF and EPUB formats: http://books.google.com/books?id=4SoP...] If you're interested, you can't really do any better than “free”!]
It is (or it should be) a truism that one cannot review a translated book of poetry as a book of poetry; one must review it as a translation. So I'm not really reviewing The Sonnets of Michael Angelo, I'm reviewing John Addington Symonds' translation of said sonnets. After all—especially in a book that is not presented bilingually, with the originals on one page and the translations facing—it's difficult to know how faithful the translations are, whether for example the occasional awkwardness of phrasing lies with Buonarroti (yes, by the way, in case you were wondering—the painter/sculptor/inspiration for the term “Renaissance man”, and no, I had no idea he was a poet either before stumbling upon this at a used book sale) or with Symonds. (Of course, while reading it, I had a perfect example of this and was too stupid to jot a note down so I could quote the couplet that struck me.) For the most part, if you're used to the sixteenth-century sonnet, there's not a great deal here that's going to surprise you vis-a-vis the construction, for example:
“As one who will re-seek her home of light,
They form immortal to this prison-house
Descended, like an angel piteous,
To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright.”
(--from “Heaven-Born Beauty (First Reading)”)
(And actually, “an angel piteous” is an example, however weak, of the awkwardness I was talking about above.)
It's not awful stuff, but Buonarroti was definitely more involved in other arts, and honed them to a much finer point than he did his poetry; Symonds notes in his afterword that Buonarroti “seems to have entertained no thought of printing his poems in his lifetime” (58), and goes on to say both that “Nearly all Michael Angelo's sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his sixtieth year” (59), which comes a couple of paragraphs after “All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed and obscure in thought—the rough-hewn blockings—out of poems rather than finished works of art.” (59), which he tells us while explaining why his descendant and biographer Ascanio Condivi revised them before publication (Symonds' translation, he tells us, is from the originals first published in 1863, and “adheres to the original orthography of Michael Angelo, and omits no fragment of his indubitable compositions.”[58]). Now perhaps I'm wrong in this, but I put those things together and the conclusion I arrives at is “poetry was a hobby for Buonarroti, not a profession.” And that's all well and good; there is absolutely no reason why Buonarroti, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn't dabble in the odd bit of doggerel now and then. But if you go into this book expecting the Sistine Chapel of verse, you may find yourself disappointed. **
[and while researching this, for those of you reading this where I can add outside links, I find that a bilingual version of the Symonds translation has in fact not only been published, but is freely available at Google Books in both PDF and EPUB formats: http://books.google.com/books?id=4SoP...] If you're interested, you can't really do any better than “free”!]
January 30, 2012
These sonnets are simply brilliant. They provide a wonderfully eloquent glimpse of man's struggle with love, pain, guilt, and God.
Michelangelo might be famous for his artwork, but I am astounded that he is not more famous for his poetry.
Michelangelo might be famous for his artwork, but I am astounded that he is not more famous for his poetry.
August 30, 2011
from passionate love to passionate remorse..from women to God and the fear of death to faith and regret..
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews