On a BS thread, passing reference was made to
the biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti and
how he felt when one of his close friends died.

That thread having a different topic, of sorts,
I didn't want to go into Michelangelo there.

So, a first for Mudcat,
a thread with Michelangelo's name in the title.

Yes, he wrote sonnets and madrigals, in the Tuscan vernacular
of Dante, more or less today's Italian.

From the time that his poetry met the light of day,
there was controversy, because
Michelangelo wrote passionate love poems to another man,
without covering up the same-sex orientation in the language
(personal pronouns in masculine gender and so on).

So for centuries his poems were bowdlerized;
it was only in the 1800's that
editors like Cesare Guasti did the scholarship,
referred to the Buonarroti archives,
and published the authentic "Rime" with footnotes and annotations.

With the 1900's, matters went further;
by this time the Italian lyrics were being translated
into I don't know how many other languages.

The English writer John Addington Symonds,
homosexual and resolutely so,
wrote groundbreaking English translations of
Michelangelo's poems.
That was a hundred years ago,
and if anything
the poetry has been more closely studied,
better publicized, since then.

People who set these to music are few and far between, such as
classical composers
Hugo Wolf,
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Benjamin Britten.