It is difficult to connect this vaporous incorporeal "donna" of the poems with those brawny colossal adult females of the statues, unless we suppose that Michelangelo remained callous both to the physical attractions and the emotional distinction of woman as she actually is.
I have tried to demonstrate that, plastically, he did not understand women, and could not reproduce their form in art with sympathetic feeling for its values of grace, suavity, virginity, and frailty.

He imported masculine qualities into every female theme he handled.

The case is different when we turn to his treatment of the male figure.

It would be impossible to adduce a single instance, out of the many hundreds of examples furnished by his work, in which a note of femininity has been added to the masculine type.

He did not think enough of women to reverse the process, and create hermaphroditic beings like the Apollino of Praxiteles or the S.Sebastian of Sodoma.
His boys and youths and adult men remain, in the truest and the purest sense of the word, virile.