Approximately 300 of Michelangelo’s poems, including sonnets and madrigals, survive.
Michelangelo is celebrated primarily as a sculptor, painter, and architect, but he was also a serious poet. His surviving literary work consists of more than 300 poems, although exact totals vary slightly depending on whether fragments, drafts, and incomplete pieces are counted separately.
The poems explore love, beauty, spirituality, guilt, aging, death, and salvation. Many are sonnets or madrigals, while other surviving pieces include quatrains and funeral poems. His poetry reflects the influence of Renaissance humanism and Neoplatonic ideas that he encountered in the Medici circle during his youth.
A common misconception is that Michelangelo wrote only a small number of occasional verses. In fact, poetry remained an important creative outlet throughout his life. Some poems were addressed to Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and about 60 are addressed to men. Later editors altered pronouns in some published versions, obscuring the original emotional and personal context.