The Frankfurt-based literary scholar Christine Ott is researching homoerotic poetry in Italy during the early modern period. For her book project, the professor of Romance philology at Goethe University has secured an Opus Magnum grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, as the university announced on Thursday. This support will free her from teaching obligations for eighteen months, and the foundation will fund a replacement.
Operating under the working title “Michelangelo and His Brothers. Homoerotic Poetry in the Early Modern Period,” Ott intends to compile sources from the 14th to the 16th centuries that have been little studied. Until now, it has been considered remarkable that the painter and sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti wrote love poems to young men. His verse is regarded as the first major collection of vernacular texts to voice such forbidden feelings at the time — even though homosexual acts could be punishable by death.
Homoerotic Texts Before Michelangelo
Ott now aims to demonstrate that Michelangelo was not alone in taking this risk. Some 150 years before him, poet communities had already formed, in which relationships and romantic ties between men figured in their writings. “I’m interested in what function these poems served, how they were received and transmitted,” Ott said.
In addition to the book, the scholar plans an edition featuring roughly 100 selected brief texts. Even now, according to the university, she is convinced that the masculine ideals present in these pieces are rather strikingly relevant today.
Ott has already devoted substantial attention to Michelangelo as a poet. In 2024 she published the study “Cambiare pelle” about subjectivity and creativity in Michelangelo’s lyric poetry. The homoerotic dimension of his poems had long been veiled: Michelangelo’s great-nephew published them in 1623 with altered pronouns; it was only the English translation by John Addington Symonds in 1878 that restored the original genders. (mize)
