Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was one of the most inspired creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo da Vinci, the most potent force in the Italian High Renaissance. As a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, he exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent Western art in general. Anthony Mortimer was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Lausanne and in 1994 Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters (1984-85) and has also directed the inter-university troisieme cycle seminar for postgraduate students of English. He is a member of the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Anthony Mortimer's major interests are in Shakespeare, poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Anglo-Italian literary relations, and verse translation.