As early as 1304, Giotto portrayed an incandescent moment between Judas and Christ in his frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Michelangelo could do this because Renaissance Italy had a surprisingly modern understanding of sexual identity. It would do today’s church, as well as the mayor of Rio, a lot of good to acknowledge and embrace the gay message of the greatest of all Catholic artists. These men express their love openly and proudly – in the house of God.

The kissing couples in the Sistine Chapel are his ultimate defiance of prejudice. In poems addressed to his beloved Tommaso dei Cavalieri he argues that by loving male beauty he adores God. A fervent Catholic, Michelangelo was also a philosophically inclined poet whose writings try to reconcile christianity with his sexuality. It is time the church acknowledged the central place of homosexuality in his art. Michelangelo was known, as he acknowledged to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, to love the male body, and was accused of turning the Sistine into a “bathhouse” with all his male nudes. Anything but chaste … detail of The Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Rome.