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Some further light may here be thrown upon Michelangelo's intimacy with young men by two fragments extracted independently from the Buonarroti Archives by Milanesi and Guasti. In the collection of the letters we find the following sorrowful epistle, written in December 1533, upon the eve of Michelangelo's departure from Florence. It is addressed to a certain Febo:
Febo excuses himself for not having been able to call on Michelangelo the night before he left Florence, and professes to have come the next day and found him already gone. He adds that he is in want of money, both to buy clothes and to go to see the games upon the Monte. I will add a full translation here:
The one epistle to Gherardo Perini, cited above, contains the following phrases: "I do not feel myself of force enough to correspond to your kind letter;" "Your most faithful and poor friend." Yet there was nothing extraordinary in Cavalieri, Cecchino, Febo, or Perini, except their singularity of youth and grace, good parts and beauty.
Feeling like this, Michelangelo would have been justly indignant with officious relatives and critics, who turned his amici into animi, redirected his Cavalieri letters to the address of Vittoria Colonna, discovered Florence in Febo di Poggio, and ascribed all his emotional poems to some woman.
They were published in two volumes, folio, at Saragossa, 1580, under the title Espejo de principes e cavalleros; o, Cavallero del Febo. The whole four parts, translated from the original Spanish into French, appeared in eight volumes, and an abridged version was made by the Marquis de Paulmy. The Amadis cycle long remained immensely popular. p. 129 Gad-bee in his Brain.
I have made them reveal the man in his personal relations to Pope Julius II., to Vittoria Colonna, to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, to Luigi del Riccio, to Febo di Poggio. I have let them tell their own tale, when sorrow came upon him in the death of his father and Urbino, and when old age shook his lofty spirit with the thought of approaching death.
"Febo, Albeit you bear the greatest hatred toward my person I know not why I scarcely believe, because of the love I cherish for you, but probably through the words of others, to which you ought to give no credence, having proved me yet I cannot do otherwise than write to you this letter. I am leaving Florence to-morrow, and am going to Pescia to meet the Cardinal di Cesis and Messer Baldassare.
It is significant that, while Michelangelo's affection for the young Roman was thus acquiring force, another friendship, which must have once been very dear to him, sprang up and then declined, but not apparently through his own fault or coldness. We hear of Febo di Poggio in the following autumn for the first and last time.
But Guasti, conscientiously collecting fragments of Michelangelo's verses, gives six lines, which he found at the foot of the epistle: These verses seem to have been written as part of a long Capitolo which Michelangelo himself, the elder, used indifferently in addressing Febo and his abstract "donna." Who Febo was, we do not know.
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