2008-09-24 Disappointing

Having read several authorities on Michaelangelo I found this book very disappointing. There are several criticisms I could make, but above all I think that Graham-Dixon too often allows his particular prejudices to get in the way of the facts. An example is his brief discussion of Micahelangelo's sexuality. All serious modern scholars (from Lord Clark onwards) are agreed that Michaelangelo was almost certainly homosexual in inclination: though whether he remained other than celibate we will probably never know. Graham-Dixon's suggestion that there is no evidence one way or the other and that he was probably non-sexual is lazy and not convincing. There is quite a lot of evidence pointing the other way. No mention is made, for example, of Micahelangelo's known infatuation with the youth Tommaso dei Cavalieri and the homoerotic love sonnets which flowed from the artist's pen. Granted, the fact that his subject matter was often the male nude is not in itself determinative, but the contrast with the clearly heterosexual Raphael is striking. The Pope's Ceilling is a much better read; take this book with a large pinch of salt!