Michelangelo Buonarroti

One of the greatest artists in human history, and one of the leading lights of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a man who understood the Catholic attraction to the beauty of the human form, a beauty in which God deigned to clothe Himself in the Incarnation.

It’s hard to imagine a modern artist being paid by the Pope to decorate a church with the vibrant nudes that Michelangelo used for the Sistine Chapel. Or of any esteemed Catholic artist today who would fashion a crucifix with a naked Christ. Or so daringly combine the strength of devotion with the strength of the unveiled male body. Michelangelo did it all.

In spite of the opposition to this glorying in the human form, Michelangelo is but one representative of an authentic current of Catholic esthetics that figures that if God has created man’s body as good and that if Christ has glorified that by His own coming as man, then art is free to use that form to glorify God, even in ways that aren’t explicitly “religious,” as we see in some of the “merely” decorative nudes that Michelangelo uses in the Sistina. Indeed, if man in his body and soul is truly the culmination of God’s creation, then he becomes the most fitting creature to be represented by art.

The artist’s own sexuality gave him a particular insight into the beauty of the male form and a sensitivity to its beauty. This perhaps was a gift that allowed him to offer his particularly vigorous art to God’s glory and for the building-up of the generations that have come after him.

That peculiar (queer?) viewpoint comes through also in some of his written art, the exquisite sonnets that he composed. This page discusses his sexuality, as seen through certain of his sonnets.

It’s too bad that our own culture, warped perhaps by mutant strains of Calvinist Puritanism (both of the religious and non-religious sorts), equates human flesh with nothing but lust. The old Catholic genius, rooted in Christ’s own flesh, saw the body as an expression of God’s glory, and the erotic as one of the most vivid metaphors for the overpowering presence of the Divine.