Michelangelo's Gifts: Art, Love, and Politics in Renaissance Italy

Michelangelo's Gifts tells the story of the artist's most intimate relationships and his deepest political commitments in the last decades of his life. The first study in over forty years of his relationship with his beloved, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, and the first in English, it is also the first comprehensive investigation of Michelangelo's gift-giving practices. Maria Ruvoldt here examines the evolution of Michelangelo's gift-giving strategies and their meanings from 1532, when Michelangelo...