Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is universally celebrated as one of the greatest artists of all time, yet this volume also reveals the iconic sculptor and painter to be an innovative poet. His intense and passionate sonnets dedicated to Tommaso de' Cavalieri reveal a highly charged, homoerotic fervour (deliberately obscured by Michelangelo's first editor in 1623); but both these and the poems for his fellow-poet Vittoria Colonna are already permeated by the profound religious sensibility that would dominate his later work. Michelangelo's letters also provide an insight into his family relations and his day-to-day life as a working artist, resulting in a fascinating self-portrait of one of the towering figures of the Renaissance.<BR>Anthony Mortimer's versions of Petrarch in Penguin Classics were hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as 'a deeply serious and accomplished work of literature'. These translations are accompanied by an introduction demonstrating the significance of the artist's verse in its own right. This edition also includes Vasari's 1550 Life of Michelangelo, a chronology, further reading and notes.