for ceremonial pageants. It’s easy to picture him some night at the studio stirring up some of the mischief he describes in one of his notebooks. “If you want to make a fire that will set a room ablaze without injury, do this. First, perfume the room with a dense smoke of incense, or some other odiferous substance: it is a good trick to play. Or boil ten pounds of brandy to evaporate, but see that the room is completely closed, and throw up some powdered varnish among the fumes. This varnish will be supported by the smoke. Then enter the room suddenly with a lighted torch, and at once it will be set ablaze.”
All in all, it was an intoxicating time for the young man from Vinci. Preternaturally gifted as an artist, ravishing to look at, and only in his early twenties, he had risen with disconcerting rapidity to become a partner at one of the most important workshops in one of the world’s most prosperous and artistically vibrant cities. Few certain traces of Leonardo survive from this phase of his life, but one that does—a note he scrawled to himself on the back of his earliest surviving drawing—at least fleetingly suggests a mood of contentment. Written in 1473, it reads simply, “I am happy .”
T HAT’S SURELY NOT the way he felt when, three years later, he was handed a court summons. An anonymous complaint against him and three other young men had been filed with the Florentine authorities in early 1476, and in response the city’s moral police, known as the Officers of the Night and Monasteries, had opened a criminal investigation. The youths werebeing summoned to face charges of having engaged in sodomy with a seventeen-year-old apprentice goldsmith named Jacopo Saltarelli—a notorious debauchee who, as the anonymous complaint put it, “pursues many immoral activities and consents to satisfy those persons who request such sinful things from him.” Saltarelli, it seems, moonlighted as a prostitute.
Homosexuality was not uncommon in late-fifteenth-century Florence, especially not in the city’s tight-knit art studios, with their all-male staffs, their intimate living quarters, and their perpetual focus on the beautiful male body. Several leading artists in Renaissance Florence are known to have been homosexual. By the 1470s a Renaissance cult of Plato had also taken hold among the city’s political and scholarly elite, prompting a revival in upper-class society of the ancient Greek ideal of erotic love between men and boys. As a result of all this, not surprisingly, Florence acquired something of a reputation as a gay haven. The word
Florenzer , or Florentine, even came to mean “sodomite” in German slang of the period.
Plenty of clues scattered throughout Leonardo’s notebooks suggest that he was a homosexual. But, as with so many of his passions, his interest in sex ultimately transformed itself into a kind of detached curiosity about the mysterious workings of the body: an almost reverent fascination, not without its humorous side, that comes across clearly, for example, in an extended rumination on the penis that he would later record in one of his notebooks. “It has dealings with human intelligence,” he wrote, “and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimesit moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. … This creature often has a life and an intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it. That which he seeks to cover and hide, he ought to expose solemnly, like a priest at mass.”
The priests of Florence wouldn’t have appreciated that comparison. Most routinely railed against homosexuality from their pulpits, and their remonstrations fell on plenty of receptive ears. The city authorities themselves prosecuted more than a hundred accused “sodomites” annually, with punishments
All in all, it was an intoxicating time for the young man from Vinci. Preternaturally gifted as an artist, ravishing to look at, and only in his early twenties, he had risen with disconcerting rapidity to become a partner at one of the most important workshops in one of the world’s most prosperous and artistically vibrant cities. Few certain traces of Leonardo survive from this phase of his life, but one that does—a note he scrawled to himself on the back of his earliest surviving drawing—at least fleetingly suggests a mood of contentment. Written in 1473, it reads simply, “I am happy .”
T HAT’S SURELY NOT the way he felt when, three years later, he was handed a court summons. An anonymous complaint against him and three other young men had been filed with the Florentine authorities in early 1476, and in response the city’s moral police, known as the Officers of the Night and Monasteries, had opened a criminal investigation. The youths werebeing summoned to face charges of having engaged in sodomy with a seventeen-year-old apprentice goldsmith named Jacopo Saltarelli—a notorious debauchee who, as the anonymous complaint put it, “pursues many immoral activities and consents to satisfy those persons who request such sinful things from him.” Saltarelli, it seems, moonlighted as a prostitute.
Homosexuality was not uncommon in late-fifteenth-century Florence, especially not in the city’s tight-knit art studios, with their all-male staffs, their intimate living quarters, and their perpetual focus on the beautiful male body. Several leading artists in Renaissance Florence are known to have been homosexual. By the 1470s a Renaissance cult of Plato had also taken hold among the city’s political and scholarly elite, prompting a revival in upper-class society of the ancient Greek ideal of erotic love between men and boys. As a result of all this, not surprisingly, Florence acquired something of a reputation as a gay haven. The word
Florenzer , or Florentine, even came to mean “sodomite” in German slang of the period.
Plenty of clues scattered throughout Leonardo’s notebooks suggest that he was a homosexual. But, as with so many of his passions, his interest in sex ultimately transformed itself into a kind of detached curiosity about the mysterious workings of the body: an almost reverent fascination, not without its humorous side, that comes across clearly, for example, in an extended rumination on the penis that he would later record in one of his notebooks. “It has dealings with human intelligence,” he wrote, “and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimesit moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. … This creature often has a life and an intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it. That which he seeks to cover and hide, he ought to expose solemnly, like a priest at mass.”
The priests of Florence wouldn’t have appreciated that comparison. Most routinely railed against homosexuality from their pulpits, and their remonstrations fell on plenty of receptive ears. The city authorities themselves prosecuted more than a hundred accused “sodomites” annually, with punishments
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