He was a man of physically frigid temperament, extremely sensitive to beauty of the male type, who habitually philosophized his emotions, and contemplated the living objects of his admiration as amiable, not only for their personal qualities, but also for their esthetical attractiveness.[63] A temperament of this kind seems to have had no significance for the men of those days; they were blind to all homosexual emotion which had no result in sodomy.

Plato found such attraction a subject for sentimental metaphysics, but it was not until nearly our own time that it again became a subject of interest and study.

Yet it undoubtedly had profound influence on Michelangelo's art, impelling him to find every kind of human beauty in the male form, and only a grave dignity or tenderness, divorced from every quality that is sexually desirable, in the female form.

This deeply rooted abnormality is at once the key to the melancholy of Michelangelo and to the mystery of his art.
Michelangelo's contemporary, the painter Bazzi (1477-1549), seems also to have been radically inverted, and to this fact he owed his nickname Sodoma.

As, however, he was married and had children, it may be that he was, as we should now say, of bisexual temperament.