In Rome in 1532 Michelangelo, then fifty-seven, met a young nobleman, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, and wrote him about thirty poems. When they were first printed, in 1623, his great-nephew changed the pronouns so they seemed to be written to a woman.
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Michelangelo wrote some three hundred poems, and the largest group written to one person is to Tommaso de' Cavalieri. They are love poems in the line of Petrarch and of Plato, in which the beloved's beauty lifts the lover toward God. Cavalieri stayed in his life to the end and was with him when he died in 1564. It is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens sooner.
The first edition, in 1623, was made by his great-nephew, also called Michelangelo, who changed the gender of the pronouns. English readers got the originals back in 1893, when John Addington Symonds translated them as Michelangelo wrote them.
With the poems Michelangelo sent Cavalieri drawings, among them Ganymede carried off by Zeus's eagle. It is the same myth Plato's Laws, on this shelf, accuses the Cretans of inventing.
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