Leonardo gay
On 9 April , Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities. Leonardo and others involved were acquitted. These circumstances led to hostility, even warlike. However, recent research suggests that he may have been gay, and that his sexuality played a significant role in his life and work.
The work became very popular and the legend managed to persist. However, although no concrete evidence exists, it's generally assumed that he was gay. His character was also considered to be extremely sociable and entertaining. We do know that he was never married.
Leonardo da Vinci is widely known for his artistic genius and innovative scientific discoveries, but his personal life has been shrouded in mystery. Leonardo is always described in all sources as extremely handsome and elegant. Besides Lomazzo, the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud claimed in his essay "A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci" that Leonardo must have been passively homosexual.
It is therefore surprising that he remained unmarried. Moreover, the banking houses of Florence in the 15th century were the largest in Europe e. He could have been asexual as well. Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the year-old Jacopo Saltarelli.
In Leonardo, the character is shown to be gay – something that chimes with the current academic consensus. It is a typical insult in Italy to insult someone sexually e. Leonardo took the Milanese boy Salai as a pupil when he was about 10 years old. Due to the circumstances, it was probably a slander with the aim of harming the ruling Medici family, whereby Leonardo was caught in the crossfire.
There is evidence, however, that Salai was married to a Blanca de Anono. The poet Lomazzo was then instrumental in spreading the legend of a gay Leonardo. Well after Leonardo's death, he published a stage work that has Leonardo saying he did it with Salai. In the paper, titled Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, the renowned psychoanalysis argues that the artist was celibate but was secretly gay, and that he sublimated these.
The only real piece of evidence to support this notion is an accusation of sodomy with a male prostitute from , made anonymously in the town hall's letterbox. Florence was a republic in the Middle Ages and was not subject to any noble house. The subject of da Vinci’s sexuality has been discussed for decades, with historians.
Historian Elizabeth Abbott argues that understanding Leonardo da Vinci’s sex life, or lackthereof, provides a rare glimpse into how sexuality and male love was understood and practised in. The cause was an anonymous complaint. The banks had many debtors and therefore many enemies.
Leonardo was a native of Florence. There are no contemporary historical sources that suggest a relationship between Leonardo and Salai. It is also possible that he had affairs with ladies-in-waiting that were not in keeping with his status and were therefore clandestine.
The artist was twice publicly accused of having gay sex, his youthful male protege was removed because of the “wicked life he had led” with Leonardo, and his own writings repeatedly mused on his own attraction to men – and borderline revulsion to sex with women. Both of them accompanied the master painter until his death.
His work is popular science and lacks any historical basis, as he himself states several times. There are no contemporary historical sources proving Leonardo's homosexuality. That he was gay is only one possibility. There is evidence of a court case in for sodomy homosexuality.
Although the play is a work of fiction, it is still cited as a historical source today cf. It therefore became fashionable to accuse the Florentines in general of homosexuality.