The most published and lauded woman writer of early sixteenth-century Italy, Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) in effect defined what was the "acceptable" face of female authorship for her time. Hailed by the generation's leading male literati as an equal, she was praised both for her impeccable command of Petrarchan style and for the unimpeachable chastity and piety of the persona she promoted through her literary works. This book presents for the very first time a body of Colonna's verse that reveals much about her poetic aims and outlook, while also casting new light on one of the most famous friendships of the age. Sonnets for Michelangelo, originally presented in manuscript form to her close friend Michelangelo Buonarroti as a personal gift, illustrates the striking beauty and originality of Colonna's mature lyric voice and distinguishes her as a poetic innovator who would be widely imitated by female writers in Italy and Europe in the sixteenth century. After three centuries of relative neglect, this new edition promises to restore Colonna to her rightful place at the forefront of female cultural production in the Renaissance.

New translations by Joseph Tusiani of Michelangelo’s little-known but highly memorable verse.

A bilingual edition of the more than 300 sonnets, madrigals and other poems produced by Michelangelo over his long career. The poems reveal much of the artist's inner feelings about such universal themes as love, death and redemption.

Michelangelo's poems are like the letters of other artists: they range from formal words of thanks to passionate argument; they flatter patrons, address lovers - and God. As in his sculpture, Elizabeth Jennings remarks, so in the poems, the dominating feature is vehement energy, an energy which is mastered by a longing for order.

The iconic Renaissance painter and sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a prolific and gifted poet. This groundbreaking collection presents verses, intense and passionate, that capture Michelangelo's eroticism and spirituality, alongside letters that provide fascinating insight into his family relations and day-to-day life as a working artist. The result is a revealing portrait of a towering figure of the Renaissance. --Penguin Press.