Da vinci was gay

Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the year-old Jacopo Saltarelli. Historians have disagreed on whether Leonardo had relationships with men, or whether he was celibate. Policing was relatively light.

The former wrote love poems to Tommaso Cavalieri, gay young nobleman, while the latter apparently had an ongoing arrangement with a rent-boy called Riccio. Even that allegation, of course, may have been speculative or malicious.

That context is not one that easily maps on to modern understandings, nor one that will seem comfortable in all its aspects today. This need not be a binary distinction: he may have been celibate during certain periods of his life and sexually active during others.

Moreover, Leonardo wrote at length in his personal notebooks about how the thought of sex between a man and woman disgusts him. Age-gaps were not exclusive to same-sex relationships: girls might also be married very young.

We know less about the women, because prosecutions, the main source of records, generally targeted men. Was Leonardo da Vinci gay or asexual? Even that allegation, of course, may have been speculative or malicious. Only about 20 per cent of those accused of sodomy were actually convicted, and fines were not always collected in full.

The Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci (–) left thousands of pages of writings and drawings but rarely made any references to his personal life. This figure might seem astonishing today, but it reflects a very different set of sexual norms in the historical period.

The list of Renaissance men who had sexual or romantic relationships with other men is a long one and was features Michelangelo and Machiavelli, to name two of the most famous. This last-named man vinci a member of a prominent Florentine family who were intermarried with the Medici rulers of the city.

On 9 AprilLeonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities. This pederastic model was, however, typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence, with the younger man often aged between 12 and The year-old Saltarelli also fits the pattern.

So far as Leonardo da Vinci is concerned, the document is the only specific written evidence from his own lifetime that we have concerning the artist’s sexuality. Although sodomy was illegal, it was very common for young men in Renaissance Florence to have sex with other men.

[1] The resulting uncertainty, combined with mythologized anecdotes from his lifetime, has resulted in much. Renaissance society did not have the concept of firm sexual orientation that exists today and many men were in practice bisexual. While Lomazzo was too young to have encountered either of the pair, he could have met people who had known them.

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 s. 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.

As an anonymous denunciation, however, the report was not accepted, and less than two months later the group was absolved on condition that they were not reported again. Renaissance attitudes tended to echo those of the ancient world and, as recent research by historian Rachel Hope Cleves on British author Norman Douglas has shown, tolerance of pederasty persisted in Europe into the 20th century.

He may also have been what we would now call asexual. Have in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen. Historian Elizabeth Abbott argues that understanding da Vinci’s sex life, or lack thereof, provides a rare glimpse into how sexuality and male love was understood and practised in Renaissance.

Luckily, Da Vinci lived in Florence, which had a relatively thriving gay subculture, and since there were no corroborating witnesses, the charges were dismissed. Yet alongside that hostility was a degree of acceptance. letter from Leonardo da Vinci to Ludovico Sforza; a résumé outlining his abilities in science, engineering and art.

A controversial essay by Freud in fisting gay, entitled “Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood,” psychoanalyses the artist, positing that he was gay, but celibate.