Leonardo davinci gay
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Each episode of the series, commissioned by a coalition of European broadcasters, will revolve around one of his masterworks, reports The Times.
Asked about the decision to depict the Renaissance polymath as gay, Thompson told entertainment magazine Variety: “It’s certainly a feature but it’s not the main pillar on which we are hanging it.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber.
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. Aged 23, Leonardo was among four artists publicly accused of sodomy following an anonymous tip-off. Here's what we know for sure. 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).
From the moment Leonardo had taken him into his workshop, he never parted with him until the year of his move to France, 1517: the Salaì followed him to Amboise, but stayed little with the master (he certainly was not with Leonardo when the genius disappeared). His art and his life, Suwa Culture Center, 1983
Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools.
Citizens who wished to denounce someone for sodomy had at their disposal a “drum” into which they could insert a sheet with the names and surnames of the accused, relying on the fact that the accusation was secret: the delators were required to sign it (this was to obviate the problem of slander), but their names were not revealed to the accused.
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).
“That’s what opera is so good at doing: it speaks to the unconscious.”
For Clayton, who this year curated a series of exhibitions based on the Royal Collection’s outstanding holding of Leonardo drawings, the opera takes us into territory that is often beyond the scope of a museum. “Relationships like this between adult men and teenage boys were actually quite common in the world Leonardo moved in,” says Mullin.
Bossi, a great admirer of Leonardo, wanting to consolidate the idea that Leonardo “loved pleasures,” brings as proof, the artist writes, “a note of his concerning a courtesan called Cremona, a note communicated to me by an authoritative person. A hypothesis for chronology and patronage in Raccolta. “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.
Questi ànno avuto a soddomitare decto Jacopo: et così vi fo fede.” On June 7 the final verdict of the trial already arrives: the four defendants (Bartolomeo di Pasquino, Leonardo da Vinci, Baccino farsettaio and Leonardo Tornabuoni) are completely exonerated. But this still offers no evidence about his sexual tastes.
Essential bibliography
- Giovanni Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, Il Saggiatore, 2015
- Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo & I, Mondadori, 2008
- Frank Zöllner, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519, Taschen, 2000
- Edoardo Villata, Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist.
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.
The gay kiss between Leonardo da Vinci (Aidan Turner) and Jacopo Saltarelli (Kit Clarke) in the RAI series 2021 Folios 132v and 133v of the Codex Atlanticus. 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.
In practice, according to Rocke, most of the men of Renaissance Florence had something to do with the Officers of the Night: however, it is necessary to remember that the accusation of sodomy was often used in an instrumental way, as a means of targeting political opponents. Every artist who kept a workshop at the time was constantly surrounded by young pupils, and the androgyny of many Leonardian subjects could be explained on cultural grounds.
The most recent theory has it that Leonardo had been accompanied by a courtesan, a certain "Cremona,“ named after the city from which she came.