Lomazzo suggested that through such relationships “out of a tender age come, at a manly age, worthier and closer friends”. The 17-year-old Saltarelli also fits the pattern. This pederastic model was, however, typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence, with the younger man often aged between 12 and 18. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)Ī sexual relationship between a 43-year-old man and his 15-year-old employee would be considered reprehensible today, all the more so if, as in the case of Leonardo and Salaì, the younger person had joined the elder’s household at the age of 10. Painted by Salaì while he was a student of Leonardo da Vinci. Monna Vanna, sometimes referred to as a nude version of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo replies: “And how many times! Have in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.” Lomazzo’s fictional interlocutor asks his imaginary Leonardo whether the two have played “the game in the behind that the Florentines love so much”. While Lomazzo was too young to have encountered either of the pair, he could have met people who had known them.
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A 16th-century dialogue by art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–92) firmly identified the relationship between Leonardo and Salaì as sexual. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)ĭescribed by Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Artists (1550) as “a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair, in which Leonardo greatly delighted”, Salaì is thought to have been the model for a number of Leonardo’s works, including the painting of St John the Baptist at the Louvre and an associated drawing, The Angel in the Flesh, that shows a similar nude figure, this time with an erect penis. (We know less about the women, because prosecutions, the main source of records, generally targeted men.)Ī portrait of a boy suspected to be Salaì by Leonardo da Vinci. Renaissance society did not have the concept of firm sexual orientation that exists today and many men were in practice bisexual. There is no evidence at all that Leonardo ever slept with a woman, though that has not prevented people suggesting that he may have done. That Leonardo once wrote “intellectual passion drives out sensuality” is not conclusive evidence either way, nor is his documented observation that the genitals were “so ugly” that humanity would die out were it not for “pretty faces, adornment and unrestrained dispositions” on the part of those having sex. He may also have been what we would now call asexual. This need not be a binary distinction: he may have been celibate during certain periods of his life and sexually active during others.
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Historians have disagreed on whether Leonardo had relationships with men, or whether he was celibate. Even that allegation, of course, may have been speculative or malicious. So far as Leonardo da Vinci is concerned, the 1476 document is the only specific written evidence from his own lifetime that we have concerning the artist’s sexuality. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images) Was Leonardo da Vinci gay? The relationship that has prompted most speculation is that between Leonardo and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaì, thought to be the figured depicted on the right of this drawing by Leonardo. Francesco Guicciardini, a contemporary, speculated that Pope Leo X (r1513-21) had been “exceedingly devoted – and every day with less and less shame – to that kind of pleasure that for honour’s sake may not be named”.
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The former wrote love poems to Tommaso Cavalieri, a young nobleman, while the latter apparently had an ongoing arrangement with a rent-boy called Riccio.
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The list of Renaissance men who had sexual or romantic relationships with other men is a long one and also features Michelangelo and Machiavelli, to name two of the most famous. Yet alongside that hostility was a degree of acceptance. There was certainly religious hostility to sodomy: it was a prominent theme in the preaching of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who rose to power in Florence in the 1490s. Only about 20 per cent of those accused of sodomy were actually convicted, and fines were not always collected in full. This figure might seem astonishing today, but it reflects a very different set of sexual norms in the historical period. In his book Forbidden Friendships, historian Michael Rocke showed that in the later 15th century, an absolute majority of Florentine men appeared on magistrates’ lists of men suspected of the offence. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)Īlthough sodomy was illegal, it was very common for young men in Renaissance Florence to have sex with other men. A suspected self- portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.