during his long life is there evidence
even of friendship with a woman, while he was very sensitive to the beauty
of men, and his friendships were very tender and enthusiastic. At the
same time there is no reason to suppose that he formed any physically
passionate relationships with men, and even his enemies seldom or never
made this accusation against him. We may probably accept the estimate of
his character given by Symonds:--

Michelangelo Buonarotti was one of those exceptional, but not
uncommon men who are born with sensibilities abnormally deflected
from the ordinary channel. He showed no partiality for women, and
a notable enthusiasm for the beauty of young men.... He was a man
of physically frigid temperament, extremely sensitive to beauty
of the male type, who habitually philosophized his emotions, and
contemplated the living objects of his admiration as amiable, not
only for their personal qualities, but also for their esthetical
attractiveness.[63]

A temperament of this kind seems to have had no significance for the men
of those days; they were blind to all homosexual emotion which had no
result in sodomy. Plato found such attraction a subject for sentimental
metaphysics, but it was not until nearly our own time that it again became
a subject of interest and study. Yet it undoubtedly had profound influence
on Michelangelo's art, impelling him to find every kind of human beauty in
the male form, and only a grave dignity or tenderness, divorced from every
quality that is sexually desirable, in the female form. This deeply rooted
abnormality is at once the key to the melancholy of Michelangelo and to
the mystery of his art.

Michelangelo's contemporary, the painter Bazzi (1477-1549), seems also to
have been radically inverted, and to this fact he owed his nickname
Sodoma. As, however, he was married and had children, it may be that he
was, as we should now say, of bisexual temperament. He was a great artist
who has been dealt with unjustly, partly, perhaps, because of the
prejudice of Vasari,--whose admiration for Michelangelo amounted to
worship, but who is contemptuous toward Sodoma and grudging of
praise,--partly because his work is little known out of Italy and not
very easy of access there. Reckless, unbalanced, and eccentric in his
life, Sodoma revealed in his painting a peculiar feminine softness and
warmth--which indeed we seem to see also in his portrait of himsel