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Simon Tayengwa Correspondent
In 1475 in Caprese, Italy, a boy was born into a family of small-scale bankers and a name was given to him in this order, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

Never mind the tongue-twisting articulation as we will cut out Michelangelo from the elongated name, the brand by which the Italian would be known for a long time into the future.

Though his bones might be merged with the soil, his masterpieces and personal deeds still exude a crescendo loud enough to engulf the faculties of everyone within earshot.

Taking a glance at the name Michelangelo itself, it’s quite interesting to note that the name is a combination of Hebrew and Greek; Michael (resembling God) and Angelo (messenger), respectively. According to the scripture, names had or still have a prophetic impact upon the persona of a person.

Whatever his name was, that he would be. In 1 Samuel 25:25 the scripture reads: “Let not my Lord, I pray thee, regard this man of Belial, even Nabal: for as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him.”

Whether Michelangelo’s parents contemplated the meaning or just picked it up from a circular list in the neighbourhood, that is anybody’s guess and we currently need not to worry for now. However, to some extent the name had something in it that would grapple with his inner man in his allotted span.

It is on record that the sculptor, painter, architect and poet often sneaked out at night to a nearby graveyard and mortuary to conduct illegal anatomical lessons on corpses, later getting permission to perform his grisly studies on corpses in the Florentine church. That’s inspiring-horror when most of us can hardly walk past a tombstone in the dark, let alone a mortuary.

His subject matter, like the sculptures of Moses, David and St Paul depict some divine creation to which the enigmatic artist is subconsciously the creator. Christ is not spared in the imagination of the equivocal character as he is “hung” on the Crucifix. Towards the end of the artist’s life he painted a piece of art rendering, hysterical, wild-eyed, unstrung, nude and semi-nude beings, most commonly at the end of their wits.

Strangely, Michelangelo in his architecture had a piece titled, “Plans for New City”. Everybody who attended Sunday school would understand or read between the lines of the biblical chronology in the hands of this artist.

Contrary to alleged inspiration, the art guru slept in his clothes and boots, having dodged the bathroom for days on end. When he gave up his ghost, they had to cut away his almost pestiferous clothes, which had gummed on his skin.

With all the fame and a licence to print money, Michelangelo never walked down the aisle. Stranger than fiction to a man of his calibre. His relationships are, nonetheless, predominant in his poetry as he penned a flurry of poems to ascertain his mysterious relations to humankind. There are women, who dotted around his life, appearing and disappearing as nature would determine, but without purported physical contact.

Self-denial reigned in his “diet” and that remained a principle that governed him for reasons best known to him. He could afford a full course menu, but something within him disallowed the acts of a gormandiser as he must have imagined.

Maybe the new city was in view when, in 1554, Michelangelo put the following words in his poem known as “Poem 285”, “Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in.”

Mortals touch and depart from the soil of the earth to worlds unknown, but footprints are left behind to testify of ever living. How those footprints inscribe on the sands of time, no human being can exactly point out, or fathom the trail, but they are just there for history to narrate.