There are figures who traverse the times without losing their relevance, who manage to make their words and their work immortal in order to prolong the dialogue with humanity. Michelangelo Buonarroti is the paradigm of a man who has transcended his time. What his contemporaries Ascanio Condivi, Francisco de Holanda and Giorgio Vasari said about him, although it is a lot, does not, however, clear up the doubt as to how much the artist was permeable to the Lutheran ideas that were beginning to undermine the foundations of the Church and of a period that has come to an end. His biographers were politically correct in order to mask his heretical deviations – or perhaps blind or complacent in order not to see them – and he had the audacity to wear the scourge of Catholic orthodoxy to escape the control of the Inquisition, which sniffed out talent like a predatory Cerberus. His biographers were also prudent in turning into flattery the bitter judgments that the artist issued - and swallowed - about the Medici, who had created and destroyed him, as an incorruptible republican refractory to the abuse of the family that gave Florence its misfortune and its glory. Only from the vantage point of contemporary times is it possible to review the clumsy ellipses of his biographers and give a new meaning to a work that was always sold for the exorbitant price of the artist's own submission.
The man who triumphed in his time, who was revered by popes, princes and cardinals, who was able to live like a king of his work - although he chose to do so as a beggar - was also a lonely soul, tormented by the poorly assumed "sin" of homosexuality. Michelangelo, Sculptor of Dreams is an up-to-date biography and a suggestive emotional guide to Rome and Florence—the cities that left the greatest mark on him—in which the reader will find the beginning of the umbilical cord that ties him to his culture and his life's genesis.