Leonardo davinci gay
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And Leonardo Da Vinci, queer icon, is a solid place to start. On the latter issue, it is interesting to report, just as an example, the idea of one of Leonardo’s leading scholars, Edoardo Villata, who in 1997 devoted an extensive essay to the Louvre’s Saint John the Baptist, a work that, by virtue of its marked sensuality, is often called into question for attributing a homosexual orientation to Leonardo on the sole basis of the saint’s appearance.
In most European countries at the time, the punishment for sodomy was mutilation or execution, and the trials were often shams. However, the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left no written traces from which his sexual tastes can be inferred with palpable clarity does not, however, exclude the possibility of working on the clues to try to reconstruct Leonardo’s relationship with people of the same sex.
John we can perceive “the effusion of a homosexual elderly man” (a thesis supported by another great Leonardo scholar, Martin Kemp), and on the other hand, also an interpretation in a neo-Platonic key, with alleged meanings that refer to the thesis of the androgyny of the original and perfect man: according to the scholar, the conturbance of St.
John, which we find in other works of Leonardo (such as Leda and the Swan: we do not, however, perceive the same erotic charge from it due to the fact that the Leonardo image has come down to us only through copies and reproductions) is peculiar to figures that make themselves bearers of “an all too disconcerting naturalness seen first and foremost as generative and metamorphic power (but also as necessity),” and is explained “on the basis of his theoretical speculation.” The idea that the sensuality of certain of his subjects is therefore to be traced back to Leonardo’s highly inquisitive attitude may not convince many, but it is enough to give the reader an idea of how complicated, if not impossible, it is to infer Leonardo’s sexual orientation simply by looking at his works, without taking into account the historical and cultural context in which he operated and especially without taking into account his ideas, which we know extensively thanks to his notes.
| Francesco Melzi, Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci (c.
“In my earliest recollection of my childhood,” Leonardo da Vinci writes, “it seemed to me that, I being in the cradle, a kite came to me and opened its mouth with its tail, and many times beat me with its tail inside my lips.” In essence, Leonardo recalls having a dream in which a kite repeatedly struck his mouth with its tail. There is no clear evidence of a homosexual relationship between the two: yet, writes Dall’Orto again, who also put together the most comprehensive work on Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality, “if one did not assume a relationship between Leonardo and Salaì, one would not understand why the artist insisted for so many years on keeping him by his side as a boy and servant,” given his idle and lying character. His estate’s other half, he left to the young nobleman, Francesco Melzi, who assisted him in his final years. Historical figures are more often than not de-queered in film and academia, stripping the LGBT+ community of its contributions to history. The fact that the Salaì might have been the object of Leonardo’s attentions is, moreover, suggested to us by two sheets of the Codex Atlanticus, 132v and 133v, on which there are some scribbles by Leonardo’s pupils, one of which depicts the very famous bicycle that so many people are now familiar with. Many have tried, but always with shaky footholds, far weaker than those with which we try to reconstruct a trace of Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality. El quale Jacopo va dietro a molte misserue et consente compiacere a quelle persone richieghono di simili tristizie. A hypothesis for chronology and patronage in Raccolta. Aged 23, Leonardo was among four artists publicly accused of sodomy following an anonymous tip-off. Meanwhile, it is necessary to specify that the discussion of Leonardo’s homosexuality has impassioned few art historians, and most of those few who have tackled the subject have done so mainly to try to deny or downplay the idea of a Leonardo oriented toward people of his own sex, with an attempt, conversely, to attribute to him relationships with women (on the basis, however, of very weak footholds, as will be seen below). Yet despite the roughness of his character, Salaì was a boy of beautiful appearance, as Vasari also recounts in his Lives (“Prese in Milano Salaì milanese per suo creato, il qual era vaghissimo di grazia e di bellezza, avendo begli capegli, ricci et inanellati, de quali Lionardo si dilettò molto et a lui insegnò molte cose dell’arte”), and Leonardo was always attached to him, so much so that he frequented him for many years, and in 1519, when he dictated his last will, he left him half of his garden in Milan (where Caprotti, by the way, had already built a house). Villata rejects, on the one hand, the idea that in St. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. The second, is that among the four characters was a certain Leonardo Tornabuoni, a member of one of the most illustrious families in Florence at the time (suffice it to say that Lorenzo the Magnificent was the son of a Tornabuoni, Lucrezia): we can therefore assume that we are dealing with a case of a denunciation instrumental in targeting a prominent personage. Et a questo modo à avere a fare di molte cose, cioè servito parecchie dozine di persone delle quali ne so buon data, et alchuno dirò d’alchuno: Bartolomeo di Pasquino orafo, he is in Vacchereccia; Lionardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, he is with Andrea de Verrochio; Baccino farsettaio, he is from Or San Michele in that street that there are two large workshops of cimatori, which goes to the loggia de’ Cierchi: he has opened workshop again of farsettajo; Lionardo Tornabuoni, dicto il teri: he wears black. The man who painted the Mona Lisa, the same person historians dub “the Renaissance man,” has essentially been proven to be gay — and I, personally, am all for Da Vinci becoming a queer icon (almost exactly) 500 years post-mortem. At the age of 24, Da Vinci was charged twice, and once (briefly) jailed along with a few other men his age, for the charge of sodomy with a male sex worker named Jacopo Saltarelli. Historian Martin Rocke, who has devoted an extensive study to the practice of sodomy in Renaissance Florence, has calculated that during the seventy-year period of the Officers of the Night, between 15 and 16 thousand men accused of entertaining homosexual activities were tried, with over 2.400 convictions (an incredibly high number when one considers that, at the end of the fifteenth century, Florence had a population of about 50 thousand, compared to 80 thousand in Venice where a similar magistracy, that of the “Lords of the Night,” operated, and where, however, only 268 convictions for sodomy were issued between 1406 and 1500). These would include his strong attachment to his mother, his habit of surrounding himself with young pupils, and the constant presence in his drawings and paintings of androgynous subjects. “He ends up dying in a duel with a crossbow.” A residue of shame While Da Vinci was a man ahead of his time in many ways, the nature of his companionship with Salaí was very much of its day. However, when books or newspapers reproduce 133v they are wont to cut out only the portion with the bicycle without showing what the students of the Tuscan genius drew beside it: thus we see two large penises, provided with legs, marching toward an orifice on which is inscribed “Salaì.” Of course, this is not proof (any male, even today, will have happened to be accused of homosexuality in goliardic circles), but it is nonetheless a fact that Salaì turns out to be the only pupil of Leonardo for whom a similar joke is attested.
Also to the goliardic milieu of Leonardo’s workshop can be traced the recently discovered drawing of theIncarnate Angel to which was added (it is not known by whom, whether by Leonardo or some of his pupils) a conspicuously erect member, which in any case in itself proves nothing (Leonardo also left us drawings of heterosexual coitus), except that he was probably not as disinterested in sex as some scholars have implied. The attentions of scholars have particularly focused on the relationship between Leonardo and the painter Gian Giacomo Caprotti (Oreno, 1480 - Milan, 1524), whom the Tuscan genius nicknamed “Salaì” (the name of a devil in Luigi Pulci’s Morgante ) because of his character (Leonardo himself described him as a “thief, liar, obstinate, greedy” in a note in which he recalled how Caprotti had robbed him of some coins he kept in his bag: the fact dates back to 1497, seven years after Salaì, only ten years old, had entered Leonardo’s workshop). Both couples shared romantic affairs that could’ve been the stuff of legend, though only one couple attained the status. In honour of pride week, I’ll be bringing light to five people you may not have known were queer. |