Desiring the death-of-the-death. Michelangelo (madrigal n.118), Shakespeare (son. 146), Donne (sacred son. X)

Abstract

Michelangelo wrote two versions of the madrigal n. 118; the second one transforms the meaning of the first from the profane to the sacred, with minor variants. Both are included in the archive of texts known as ‘canzoniere’. An analysis of the two shows Michelangelo’s intention to introduce private drives in his work, taking care, though, of creating a framework within which to absorb those subversive aspects the prevailing morality would have rejected. Buonarroti uses the topos of the lover’s death and develops it according to the biblical logic of making death die (Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians). The encounter between a love-topos and the religious idea produces an ambiguity which reflects in the bifurcation of the madrigal in a secular version and in a religious one. It is possible to make a comparison with one sonnet by Shakespeare (son. 146) and one by Donne (sacred son. X): following Paul’s logic of the death of death in an inventive rhetoric, they express a vision of death that exorcises fear. The comparison shows that Michelangelo’s double outcome meets its ideological equivalents in the English poets’ sophisticated strategies. The connexions (of an inter-discursive kind) which exist between Buonarroti’s poems and Donne’s confirm that the two had a similar imaginative mode.