Michelangelo, was he hot?

July 21, 2008

It looks like Michelangelo has a good number of enraptured admirers on the internet. A master at sculpting male beauty, he should have been one himself, his fans often conclude.

"There is a part of me that wishes I could zap myself back to the early 16th century and court him," Carly Grinnel writes in her blog after having seen the David sculpture in person.

Oh, Michelangelo must have been freaking hot, Carly concludes.

I'm afraid she would have been terribly disappointed had she really zapped back to her 16th century blind date.

Michelangelo was an ugly and rather unclean man.

According to a series of rare, contemporary portraits and writings on show in Florence, Michelangelo had small eyes, large ears, thin lips and a forked, thin beard.

Disfigured at age 17 when a fellow student smashed his nose, he likely smelled terribly bad.

According to an unmerciful description by the 16th century painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari, "he wore stockings of dogskin constantly for months together, so that when he took them off the skin of the leg often came away with them."

Oh well, genius is genius.

Here is today Discovery News story and a video too: