If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.

This line is associated with Michelangelo’s late-life love poetry addressed to the Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532 and to whom he wrote intensely idealizing poems and letters. In these texts Michelangelo frames personal affection within a Neoplatonic-Christian vocabulary: earthly beauty, properly contemplated, can elevate the soul toward God, the source of all beauty. The sentiment reflects the Renaissance Florentine tradition (filtered through Ficino and Petrarchan lyric) in which desire is defended as spiritually purifying when directed through virtue. The wording in English typically comes via later translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets and madrigals rather than from a single public utterance.

The speaker frames love as a ladder from the material world to the divine: beauty, properly apprehended, awakens a “pure and just desire” that lifts the soul toward God, the ultimate source of all beauty. In this view, romantic or personal affection is not merely sensual or possessive but can be spiritually educative—an instance of Renaissance Neoplatonism in which earthly forms participate in a higher, eternal reality. The line also functions as a defense of the speaker’s love, insisting it is ennobling rather than corrupting, and aligning private emotion with a theological account of beauty as a reflection of God.