Michelangelo was in his late sixties when he met Cecchino dei Bracci, the charming and beautiful fifteen-year-old nephew of one of his friends. Of the boy's beauty, he wrote: "With his face God wished to correct nature." When Bracci died in 1544, at the age of sixteen, Michelangelo designed the boy's tomb and wrote no fewer than fifty poems mourning his passing. Other boys thought to have been Michelangelo's lovers were: Gherardo Perini, a muscular, strikingly beautiful young male model whose relationship with Michelangelo was the subject of much gossip at the time; Tommaso Cavalieri, an intelligent and handsome young nobleman who remained one of Michelangelo's lifelong friends; and Febo di Poggio, a young male prostitute of whom Michelangelo wrote, 'Up from the earth I rose with his wings, and death itself I could have found sweet.'