Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna Letters

These seven occasional letters, two written by Michelangelo and five by Vittoria Colonna, accompanied her visits of the artist in Rome, while he was creating the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in 1541/2 and the Conversion of Saint Paul in Cappella Paolina in 1542/3. Conversing about the paintings in the places of their creation, the two friends reserved their letters to each other personally, also not shying back from giving each other an irritated telling.Both his letters to Vittoria lay open, how irresistibly he felt driven into her physical presence. Having fallen in love at sixty, as if he were twenty, Michelangelo " inwardly glowing, seeking refuge under your eye-lashes, in the paradise of your eyes", ingeniously found pretexts for a visit in her house.But beholding her was also an artistic necessity for the artist, because from 1525 to 1543, Michelangelo created individualizing drawings of Vittoria, perhaps the most sensitive drawings he ever created, not at all Michelangelo-esque regarding his habitual muscled males, but tenderly rendering Vittoria's features, even the tiny, androgynous hill at her nasal root.Until this very day, his individualizing drawings of Vittoria, virtually a sensational novelty, have been lumped together by scholarly philistines with Michelangelo' s so-called Teste Divine , magnified exemplary heads used by the artist for didactic purposes.Michelangelo, idealizing Vittoria in his poetry, expected spiritualization of himself and of his art from her as his spiritual mentor, perhaps at the detriment of his artistic scope, because his over-zealous muse overburdened his paintings with complex thought and narrative substrates.