He felt profoundly the need of
salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision.
In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman,
love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which
entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest metaphysical
lover of all times.
At the court of the Medici at Florence, Ficinio had founded a Platonic
Academy, where Plato's works and the writings of Plotinus--his greatest
pupil--were after two thousand years translated and elucidated. Many
read and a few understood, but only in Michelangelo did the spirit of
Platonic Hellenism revive and become productive; the Platonic ideal of a
purely masculine culture, aesthetically and spiritually perfect,
illumined his soul; once again the unconditional cult of beauty and the
love of the perfect male form, which speaks to us from the _Dialogues_,
quickened an imagination, and boyhood and youth were portrayed in a
manner which has never since been equalled.
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