Showing results by author "John Addington Symonds" in All Categories

Nearly all Michael Angelo's sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his 60th year. To whom they were addressed, we only know in a few instances. Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshiped Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal.

In a society ensnared by the shadows of ancient prejudices and outdated beliefs, John Addington Symonds boldly confronts the hypocrisy and misinformation that plague our understanding of sexuality. In this powerful essay, which circulated anonymously, Symonds emerges as a modern-day Virgil, guiding readers through the harrowing landscape of medico-legal definitions of sexual deviance that shaped his era and continue to echo in ours. He advocates for humane values amidst the labyrinth of Victorian taxonomies and the oppressive “terrorism” of religion that constructed the identity of the ...