To Gift Him Pictures of Divine Sodomy: Ambivalent Homoeroticism in Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede

Written by Hassan Saab
Edited by Madelaine Mitchell

Figure 1. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rape of Ganymede, 1532. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge.

In the early 1530s, Michelangelo Buonarroti sent young Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri a series of intimate drawings engaging in various mythological narratives. These drawings, usually depicting male nudes and homoerotic subject matter, were accompanied by reverent letters and Petrarchan love poems. Michelangelo had met young Tommaso in Rome in 1532 and was struck by the boy’s exceptional beauty. The artist, in his late fifties, immediately fell in love with the young boy, and their exceptional friendship lasted until Michelangelo’s death.  In 1533, The Rape of Ganymede (fig. 1) and Tityus (fig. 2) were the first drawings that Michelangelo gifted to Tommaso. While the original Tityus have survived, the drawing of Ganymede is presumed lost. However, two copies of it are deemed close enough to the original and valid for iconographic analyses (1). This drawing refers to the ancient myth of Jupiter transforming into an eagle and abducting the young shepherd Ganymede to become his attendant and cupbearer. James Saslow breaks up the myth into three main episodes.  In the first episode, the bird-god, mesmerized by the mortal boy’s exceptional beauty, rapes him and drags him up to the realm of the divine. This episode of rape and flight is the one represented in Michelangelo’s drawing. The second episode consists of Ganymede’s service as an attendant and an object of sexual desire to Jupiter. The third and final episode is Jupiter’s immortalization of Ganymede by turning him into the constellation Aquarius. In direct contrast to the apparently virtuous Ganymede, Tityus tells the story of Tityus, who rapes Latona, mother of Apollo, and is punished  by a vulture gnawing at his liver which grew back every night to be consumed again the next day. 

Giorgio Vasari argues that these drawings only served a pedagogical purpose and were intended to be teaching aids for Tommaso who was learning to draw (2). However, given the intimate and personal qualities of these drawings, the circumstances of their gifting as well as their symbolic subjects, they function as more than mere teaching aids, they express an intensity of feelings. It is possible to argue that Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede, gifted to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, expresses the artist’s ambivalent homoerotic feelings about his love for Tommaso.  

Figure 2. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tityus, 1532. Royal Library, Windsor.

To understand the homoeroticism of this particular drawing, it is important to consider the myth of Ganymede and its iconography from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance as well as its interpretations by Renaissance audiences. The place of mythological imagery in Michelangelo’s oeuvre as discussed by Maria Ruvoldt, the iconography of heroic rape studied by Diane Wolfthal, Alexander Lee’s survey of the gift-giving culture of the Renaissance, and  James Saslow’s extensive study of Ganymede in the Renaissance, will all help guide this present study of Michelangelo’s drawing. To understand the ambivalence of the artist’s feelings, it is crucial to look at the contexts of homosexuality and of homosociality as well as Michelangelo’s personal life and psychology. It is important then to consider his letters and poems as well as the relation of Ganymede to other gift drawings such as Tityus.  

First, the Ganymede drawing itself, by its visual identity and its subject, reflects a conflicted attitude toward male same-sex desire. The drawing presents the muscular, sculpted body of a curly-haired youth being carried aloft by Jupiter, taking the form of  a massive eagle. The giant bird, dominating its prey from behind, grips the boy’s legs and spreads them. Ganymede has his neck stretched over the bird’s chest while the eagle’s head bends around the boy’s chest. This intertwinement of bodies is one of sensible embrace and haptic delicacy while being, at the same time, aggressive and physical. Ganymede’s facial expression exhibits serenity and peace despite the aggressiveness of the eagle. There’s a subtle sense of rapture embedded into the boy’s relaxed features as if he is in a dream-like state or experiencing  partial loss of consciousness. This state of rapture might be a result of the delight that the boy is experiencing in his ascension and elevation towards the divine. At the same time, considering the positioning of the characters and the homoerotic connotations of the myth, it might also be symbolizing sexual passivity.  

Figure 3. Circle of Apollonio di Giovanni, Rape of Ganymede, 1465. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston.

Earlier depictions of Ganymede rarely, if ever, capture this level of proximity and eroticism that Michelangelo’s drawing showcased. Michelangelo accomplished this  by introducing a front-to-back perspective of the characters, making their bodies intertwine, and exposing the boy’s genitals in a full-frontal pose by the almost non-anatomical distension of his thighs (3). This pose gives the illusion of anal penetration and makes the drawing much more erotic than earlier Renaissance depictions (fig. 3) where Ganymede is fully-clothed, the eagle’s grip is not as firm, and little physical proximity exists between the boy and the eagle (4). The pose of Ganymede in Michelangelo’s drawing is somewhat similar to the reclining posture of Leda in his Leda and the Swan painting (fig. 4). Instead of reclining horizontally onto a material support, Ganymede is in a vertical position reclining on the body of the eagle. The subtle eroticism in the drawing relies on the tension in this reclining figure, the play of passivity and control between the bodies and the contemplative moment of suspense marking Ganymede’s transition from an earthly realm to the divine (5). It is also possible to read the comparison of the two works as a transfer of sexuality and eroticism from female Leda to male Ganymede who becomes homoerotic (6). Therefore, the submissiveness of Ganymede to the dominant virile eagle-god can be seen as an act of feminine sexual passivity, bringing it back to the realm of  sodomy and homoeroticism.

Figure 4. After Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leda and the Swan, 1530s. The National Gallery, London.

Departing from the drawing, the myth itself was interpreted during the Renaissance according to Neoplatonism and Christianity. Each of these ideologies conceived the place of Ganymede’s sexual connotations differently. Michelangelo, being a devout Christian, but also having evolved in his early years within the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, was aware of both ideologies and their readings of Ganymede (7). Neoplatonism bases its reading of the myth on recuperated ancient concepts and ideologies, mainly Plato’s, and their reinterpretation by Renaissance humanists. In 4th century BCE, Plato retraced the origins of the myth to the Cretans who invented the myth to justify their homosexuality while Xenophon believed the myth to be about the superiority of the mind over the body (8). These different erotic and spiritual readings of the myth transferred into Neoplatonic thought that divided love into earthly and heavenly. For Neoplatonism, Ganymede’s myth symbolized a flight towards divine love, leaving behind earthly desires (symbolized by the faintly sketched out dogs at the bottom of the drawing). Neoplatonists believed in the superiority of loving the divine over earthly love of another human. However, they were aware of the erotic side of Ganymede and tolerated it, they even spiritualized it. The erotic earthly pleasures that one might have with another human are “the closest earthly analogue to the exaltation of experiencing divine love”(9). Similarly, the sense of rapture felt by Ganymede has spiritual/heavenly and erotic/earthly components. Ascending to the realm of the divine, transported by Jupiter, Ganymede feels an elatedness associated with divine love and the elevation of his spirit. In this case, the rape is heroic, it manifests as a spiritual union with a god (10). Being physically penetrated and embraced by an eagle, a material manifestation of Jupiter, Ganymede experiences a sense of rapture, an earthly ecstasy, a manifestation of material love in contrast to divine love. Here, the rape is physical, the gratification is earthly. In that way, Michelangelo is expressing the duality of his experience of love. Some of his sonnets to Tommaso are aligned with Neoplatonism, clearly refer to the myth of Ganymede and express a clear dichotomy between the physical and spiritual manifestations of love. He writes:

I am the one who in your earliest years

Made your powerless eyes turn to that beauty

That leads up from the earth to heaven alive. (11)

Through the embrace of Tommaso’s beauty, a physical manifestation of love, Michelangelo and his lover are able to ascend, like Ganymede captured by the eagle, toward heaven, i.e. divine love. Michelangelo also shows an ambivalence regarding his identification with the characters of the drawing. Naturally, the age gap between Michelangelo and Tommaso establishes their relationship in a gendered manner (12). Michelangelo, the older one identifies with the eagle for its active/dominant role and its overall masculine qualities. In contrast, Tommaso, younger, would identify with Ganymede as the passive/submissive party of the relationship and, by extension, the feminine side of it. For example, in one of his sonnets, he writes:

I did believe myself on the first day

I saw such beauty rare and sole in kind, 

Like an eagle in the sun made blind

By the least I desire of that array. (13)

It is clear here that he identifies with the eagle. In fact, eagles are usually symbols of pedagogical nurturing which corresponds with the master-student relationship of Michelangelo with his lover. However, another one of his sonnets reads:

Plumeless with your wings I fly;

Rise by your wit to the apogee. (14)

In this sonnet, Michelangelo describes his own ascent by a lover (Tommaso) presented as a bird. In that way, he inverts the positions in the relationship, becoming the young Ganymede and Tommaso assuming the role of the dominant eagle (15). Alternatively, it might be possible to envision Ganymede as the party mainly in charge of the flight and to see the eagle laying its weight on the boy’s muscular body as they ascend together to heaven in contrast to one party carrying the other. At the same time, their bodies are so interconnected (the parallel positioning of the arms and the wings, the clenching of the feet like the eagle’s claws, the superposition of the genitals, the leaning necks) which gives the impression of one unified body. In that context, the conventional heteronormative roles are irrelevant, and the lovers become one in their flight toward divine love. As it could be noticed, Michelangelo adopts a Petrarchan style of writing while composing his poems about his male lover. However, accompanied by his drawing and filled with homoerotic undertones, his poems subvert the heterosexual style of writing and adapts it to his platonic homosocial relation with Tommaso. 

The second popular interpretation of the myth of Ganymede, other than Neoplatonism, is from Christian ideology. During medieval times, ancient content and form were separated. In the case of Ganymede, the imagery of the myth was preserved, but the classical content (duality of spiritual and erotic love) was changed. In the new medieval interpretation, the spiritual dimension of the myth was presented in Christian terms while the erotic component was either censored or condemned. This medieval vision persisted well into the Renaissance but existed alongside Neoplatonism and Humanism. Therefore, adopting medieval thought, the Renaissance Christian vision of the myth of Ganymede conceptualized a division between spiritual and carnal love (amor spiritualis et carnalis) similar to the Neoplatonic division of heavenly and earthly love (16). While the Neoplatonists tolerated the erotic aspect of the rape of Ganymede and conceived it as an earthly analogue to divine love, Christianity saw the flight of Ganymede almost exclusively as a metaphor of the elevation of the human soul by the rapture of the love of God and any homoerotic affiliation to the myth was strongly an explicitly condemned or totally avoided. This view coincides with the context of homosexuality in the Renaissance. Officially, ecclesiastical and civil authorities condemned male homosexuality and were mandated to severely punish those who engage in sodomy. In practice, homosexuality was tolerated in humanist circles and punishment of sodomy was rare and less strict. Considering that context as well as the Christian reading of the myth of Ganymede, Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede expresses the ambivalent feelings of the artist as a “presumptuous lover. (17)” Michelangelo understands the overtly homoerotic aspect of Ganymede, but he is also aware of the rejection of homosexual desire by his religion. This conflicted awareness manifested in Michelangelo’s ambivalence between his passion for Tommaso and the restrictive customs of his Christian society. In some way, his drawings to Tommaso articulated his ambivalent feelings about physical lust and the suffering and the punishment related to succumbing to these desires. This ambivalence manifested in intimate multilayered drawings that embrace the chaste and publicly reject the sexual. To better understand this internal conflict, it is interesting to study the Ganymede drawing in relation to Tityus (fig. 2) as they were presented as a pair to Tommaso. The human figures in both drawings are very similar: muscular body type, curly hair, parted thighs, bent knee. Even the eagles in each drawing have similar proportions, scale, plumage, and dominant position. It’s almost like these two drawings are mirror figures, except one is vertical and the other is horizontal. The pairing of these two drawings is meant to symbolize the duality of love as experienced by Michelangelo. Ganymede, represented vertically, symbolizes an ascent toward God and a rejection of worldly desires. He is an innocent soul totally submitted to divine love. In contrast, Tityus, composed vertically, represents an earthbound aggressor being punished for having surrendered to his carnal desires. Michelangelo seems to be taking a stance by offering these two drawings as a pair. His love for Tommaso is pure and embodied by the raptured Ganymede drawing in contrast to the sinful earthly desires of Tityus and his suffering. However, as discussed earlier, Ganymede certainly has some lustful undertones like the Tityus. Therefore, being enslaved to earthly passion is an almost inescapable side of the artist’s love for Tommaso. This is causing him great ambivalence that is accentuated by the homosexual nature of his feelings. For instance, one of his poems pertains to that struggle:

To love for what I speak of reaches higher;

Woman’s too much unlike, no heart by rights

Ought to grow hot for her; if wise and male.

One draws to heaven and to earth the other;

One in the soul, one living in the sense

Drawing its bow on what is base and vile. (18)

In this particular sonnet, Michelangelo seems to rank male love as superior to female love (19). In extension, it represents the ideal Platonic homosocial male love, incarnated by Ganymede as an object of desire of male Jupiter, as superior intellectual love; whereas, the punished earthly heterosexual desires of Tityus for Latona, as carnal and sinful. At the same time, he is aware of the “vile” and sinful nature of homosexual love, which causes him great torment. 

In conclusion, Neoplatonic and Christian conceptions of the myth of Ganymede are almost “twin sources” that envisioned love in The Rape of Ganymede as a dual concept of spiritual and erotic components, dating back to Antiquity (20). The most important difference between these two ideologies was the role of the erotic aspect of love, which Christians condemned or suppressed while Neoplatonists tolerated it and conceived it as an analogue to the superior spiritual love. Michelangelo was aware of both of these ideologies while producing his drawings to Tommaso. His Ganymede expressed his ambivalent homoerotic feelings toward Tommaso on many levels of conflicting dichotomies caused by these two different conceptions of the myth. 

While the drawing of Ganymede itself reflects Michelangelo’s ambivalent feelings for Tommaso, many contexts surrounding the creation of this drawing made it unique. Itsts function and its intimacy among the artist’s oeuvre accentuated his expressed ambivalence. He made his gift drawings in secrecy and made sure to maintain them in that condition. This discretion is unexpected considering Michelangelo’s usual bluntness in expressing his feelings openly (21). To illustrate this secrecy that the artist used exclusively in his communications with Tommaso, Saslow takes the example of Michelangelo’s first letter to his lover where he does not mention in the letter the drawings of Ganymede and Tityus attached to it. In contrast, letters he sent to other parties show him adopting the convention of disclosing what he is gifting. Furthermore, in this letter’s drafts, Michelangelo even included a postscript saying that he would be diverging from the norm of disclosing. In some other letters, he also instructs Tommaso to conceal the drawings. He also insists on the chaste nature of his love for the boy, despite the clear homoerotic undertones of his poems and drawings. Many interconnected reasons pushed Michelangelo to conceal the true nature of his love for Tommaso. The main reason being the social and legal contexts of homosexuality in the Renaissance that caused Michelangelo to fear for his reputation and of prosecution. At the same time, he tried to escape the commonly assumed stereotype of the prevalence of sodomy among artists and humanists. Accordingly, he aligned himself with Girolamo Savonarola, an avid attacker of sodomy who delivered ferocious sermons about this practice and enforced anti-sodomy laws more strictly. Also, in light of many rumours concerning his own homosexuality and his special relationship with Tommaso, he was pushed to defend himself against such accusations, conceal his true inclinations in public and thus use ambiguous mythology for personal and intimate drawings that subtly express his homoerotic desires.  

Between 1529 and 1533, in his gift drawings to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Michelangelo uses mythology for the first time in over thirty years (22). Maria Ruvoldt explains the evolution of his use of mythology over the years of his artistic practice (23). At the beginning of his career, during his initial training as a sculptor, evolving within Lorenzo the Magnificent humanist circle, Michelangelo’s practice revolved around the imitation of antiquities and ancient models. The overwhelming success of his earlier mythological sculptures made him abandon classical content for a long period of time. He was not interested in imitating ancient models anymore. That is until his trip to Ferrara where he witnessed works by Titian and Bellini and realized how mythology can be pleasurable and personal without being too serious and theoretical as he conceived within Florentine humanism. His gift drawings still departed from the Ferrara model by being much more intimate and private in its simple and refined composition. The idea is that Michelangelo took myth as a language of sensuality and made it contemplative. In addition, based on the original writings of both Michelangelo and Tommaso, it is possible to understand how the viewing of these drawings functioned in a private mode and necessitated an intimate viewing and a meditative look (24). Therefore, the medium of drawing itself is highly intimate regardless of how strongly personal its subject is. As for the mythological subject, it holds complicated narratives of love and desire that are deeply personal to the artist and are meant to be secretly shared with his lover.

One other aspect to consider is the identity of the drawings themselves as gifts, and more precisely, as gifts for a younger male lover. Alexander Lee relates these gift-drawings to the larger gift exchange culture of 16th century Italy (25). Conventionally, the initiation of gift-giving put the recipient of the gift under the obligation to reciprocate, usually in the context of an artist gifting an artwork to a nobleman in hope of receiving patronage. It is clearly not the case for Michelangelo’s drawings. He is offering them to a lover with no intent of, at least material, reciprocation. In a way, he tried to remove his gifts’ intent out of these social and mercantile conventions by giving them agency, by making them speak for themselves. Again, in opposition to the norm governing unequal social relationships at the time, the older artist sends his drawing without a text that explains their content nor their function nor his motivation to gift. This gave Tommaso, a younger apprentice, the freedom to interpret the drawings by himself as well as the nature of his relationship with Michelangelo. The drawings become in some way very similar to love tokens in the context of heterosexual courtship and the culture of gift-giving in the context of marriage (26).

All things considered, The Rape of Ganymede, among other drawings Michelangelo gifted to Tommaso, is unique among other works by the artist in its intimate qualities, its use of mythology, and its subversion of the gift-giving culture of the time. All these elements contributed to the overall mystical ambiguity of the drawing and the artist’s expression of ambivalence.

In summary, Michelangelo’s passion for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was articulated in a series of gift drawings employing ambiguous mythological narratives with sexual, and especially homoerotic, connotations. Looking at the iconography of The Rape of Ganymede through the lenses of Neoplatonism and Christian faith and their different interpretations of the duality of spiritual and erotic love, revealed other dichotomies embedded into Michelangelo’s ambivalence. By recalling the legal and social contexts of homosexuality in the Renaissance, this ambivalence was able to be viewed as a fear of suffering and of punishment. Finally, the uniqueness of the drawings as intimate gifts engaging with the mythological past within the oeuvre of the artist, really revealed how deeply personal these drawings are.

Endnotes

1.  James Saslow, “Michelangelo: Myth a Personal Imagery,” in Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 19.

2.  Giorgio Vasari, “Michelangelo Buonarotti of Florence, Painter, Sculptor and Architect (1475-1564),” in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, ed. Ernest Rhys, trans. A. B. Hinds (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.), 4:148.

3.  Saslow, 39.

4.  Saslow, 41.

5.  Maria Ruvoldt, “Michelangelo’s Mythologies,” in Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c.1300- c.1550, eds. Alexander Lee, Pit Péporté, and Harry Schnitker (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 222.

6. Leonard Barkan, “Ganymede Doubled and Tripled,” in Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 86.

7.  Saslow, 17.

8.  Erwin Panofsky, “The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 141.

9.  Saslow, 23.

10.  Diane, Wolfthal, “ ‘Heroic’ Rape Imagery,” in Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31.

11.  Michelangelo Buonarroti, sonnet 39 in Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, trans. Creighton Gilbert, ed. Robert N. Linscott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 37.

12.  Alexander Lee, “Michelangelo, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and the Agency of the Gift-Drawing,” in The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art: Materials, Power and Manipulation, ed. Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz, and Zuzanna Sarnecka (New York: Routledge, 2018), 111–2.

13.  Buonarroti, sonnet 80, 78.

14.  Buonarroti, sonnet 89, 85.

15.  James Hall, “Movements,” in Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 184.

16.  Saslow, 22.

17.  Saslow, 34.

18.  Buonarroti, sonnet 260, 258.

19.  Saslow, 36.

20.  Saslow, 21.

21.  Saslow, 50.

22.  Ruvoldt, 209.

23.  Ruvoldt, 209–15.

24.  Ruvoldt, 221.

25.  Lee, 105–107.

26.  Lee, 111.