Famous for his works as sculptor, painter, architect, and engineer and not least for painting the Sistine Chapel and his sculpture Pieta and of David, the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, commonly known as Michelangelo (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was also a prolific poet, in his lifetime penning more than 300 sonnets and madrigals.
Within his collection of 78 beautiful Petrarchan Sonnets lies an eloquent and always magnificent glimpse of man's struggle within himself with love, pain, guilt, and God, a sense of struggling to break out, perhaps like his sculptures, where art is not created but freed, and a sense too of always getting close, but never quite attaining what is desired.
The “Four sketches after the Sonnets of Michaelangelo” draw upon four of Michaelangelo’s sonnets in lyrical response to the imagery and sentiment of the great artist’s poetry, from passionate love to intense remorse, in grief and faith, and upon art and beauty. Each sketch takes its title from a theme or reference in the sonnet itself.
The images on the video for the “Four sketches” treat four of Michaelangelo’s drawings which chart an unceasing quest to find poses that would most eloquently express the emotional and spiritual state of his subjects for his artwork. Most of Michelangelo's drawings were never intended to be exhibited and he apparently destroyed a large number before he died, probably to prevent them from falling into other hands. However, the drawings offer a unique insight into how the artist worked and thought and are beautiful artworks in their own right.
(AF June 2015)
“Four sketches after the Sonnets of Michaelangelo” for solo piano
- composed and performed by Anna Ferro
Sketch I - “As from fire” - after Sonnet XXVIII
Sketch II - “The moon’s illumination” after Sonnett XXX
Sketch III - “The love-knot” - after Sonnet XXXII
Sketch IV - “Make of my sunset” - after Sonnet XLVIII
(mp3s and pdfs can be downloaded on my main music page)
Sketch I - “As from fire” - after Sonnet XXVIII
The living portion of my love is not
My heart; the love which I love has not
Heart, for in human hearts things means and low
Always exist, in impulse or in thought.
Love which came, like the soul, from God’s own hands
Made me without eyes, made you full of light;
That light cannot be seen in what death ends -
The mortal part which hurts me with delight
Just as from fire the heat cannot be parted,
Neither can I be separated from
That Beauty in who lifeness she is made.
Ardent, I run to joys which cannot fade,
That paradise where your own beauty started,
Eternal loveliness from which you come.
Sketch II - “The moon’s illumination” after Sonnett XXX
This glorious light I see with your own eyes
Since mine are blind and will not let me see.
Your feet lend me their own security
To carry burdens far beyond my size.
Supported by your wings I now am sped,
And by your spirit to heaven I am borne.
According to your will, I’m pale or red -
Hot in the harshest winter, cold in the sun.
All my own longings wait upon your will,
Within your heart my thoughts find formulation,
Upon your breath alone my words find speech.
Just as the moon owes its illumination
To the sun’s light, so I am blind until
To every part of heaven your rays will reach.
Sketch III - “The love-knot” - after Sonnet XXXII
If love is chaste, if pity comes from heaven,
If fortune, good or ill, is shared between
Two equal loves, and if one wish can govern
Two hearts, and nothing evil intervene:
If one soul joins two bodies fast for ever,
And if, on the same wings, thee two can fly,
And if one dart of love can pierce and sever
The vital organs of both equally:
If both love one another with the same
Passion, and if each other’s good is sought
By both, if taste and pleasure and desire
Bind such a faithful love-knot, who can claim,
Either with envy, scorn, contempt or ire,
The power to untie so fast a knot?
Sketch IV - “Make of my sunset” - after Sonnet XLVIII
Though long delay breeds greater tenderness
Than our desires in youth can ever know,
Still I regret my love’s belatedness -
That passion has so short a time to go.
Heaven is perverse indeed if in its care
For us it still can set old hearts on fire.
This is the fate which I must accept and bear -
To love a woman with a sad desire.
Yet maybe when the sun sinks in the west
And the end of the day is reached, I can at least
Be in the greater dark a single shade.
If love has come to me when life must fade,
If I desire, though death must touch me soon,
Of, of my sunset, Lady make my noon!
(as translated by E Jennings)