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‘Peter … was exposed to action, John was reserved for love.’

Whatever the relationship between Jesus and St John, for Leonardo to have placed a female figure in the place of St John in a painting of the Last Supper designed for the dining hall of a monastery might be thought of as rather more than just poor catechism.

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness, The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, and other books.

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Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 but is still the subject of speculation today

A new TV series about Leonardo da Vinci that portrays the Italian artist and thinker as a gay outsider has reopened a long-running debate about his sexuality.

The eight-episode drama, entitled Leonardo, was co-created by Sherlock writer Stephen Thompson and is due to premiere next year to coincide with the 500-year anniversary of da Vinci’s death.

A hypothesis for chronology and patronage in Raccolta. He judged Melzi capable of protecting his legacy, and of such wealth and character that he would not be tempted to exploit it. 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.

Da Vinci is “not merely ‘human’, as the author likes to point out, but a blithe societal misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical”, the magazine adds.

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All the same, the question of da Vinci’s sexuality has been discussed at length by countless historians.

The artist never married and although his writings “do not disclose any specific romantic interests, most recent biographers have concluded that he almost certainly had same-sex desires”, says The Times.

As Kandice Rawlings of Oxford University Press notes, “there’s no way of knowing Leonardo’s sexual orientation for sure” but “scholars’ opinions on the issue fall along a spectrum between ‘maybe’ and ‘very probably’”.

US historian Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo Da Vinci, published last year, portrays the artist as “a comparably modern figure”, says The New Yorker.

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The men who Leonardo da Vinci loved

For Clayton, Leonardo’s decision to leave Melzi his intellectual legacy – in the form of paintings, drawings and notebooks – is testament to his steadfastness. Here's what we know for sure. This article is not intended to give answers, but simply to try to outline what we know on the subject.

leonardo di vinci gay

Consider that he was a beautiful young man, and maximally in his fifteenth year.” Phidias replies, “Are you not ashamed to say this?” And Leonardo: “How ashamed? And if that were not enough, there is also a drawing entitled The Incarnate Angel from the school of Leonardo that appears to be a humorous take on the John the Baptist, depicting John (and therefore Salai) with an erect phallus.

Leonardo's John the Baptist

Then, in the famous Last Supper, Leonardo painted a female figure, often interpreted as Mary Magdalen, in the privileged position to the immediate right of Jesus.

We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. On what basis was this asserted?

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.

And in this sense the only document in which there is a definite link between Leonardo da Vinci and the practice of sodomy is a well-known accusation dating from April 9, 1476: Leonardo was 24 years old and accused of having carnal relations with a young man who was prostituting himself, a certain Jacopo Saltarelli, a goldsmith’s apprentice by profession, about seventeen years of age (the affair, which Zöllner has in mind when he writes that the artist’s proclivities were known in fifteenth-century Florence, moreover gave the cue to the 2021 Leonardo TV series for the now already famous gay kissing scene between Leonardo, played by Aidan Turner, and Jacopo, played by Kit Clarke).

“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.

“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. Leonardo never showed any interest in women and even wrote that heterosexual intercourse disgusted him. Phidias asks Leonardo, referring to the Salaì, “Did you play to him forsi the game, which the Florentines so love, of dretto?” Leonardo answers affirmatively, “And how many times!

In 1476, at the age of 24, Leonardo was twice charged with sodomy, even though the charges were common in the Florence of the quattrocento and later dropped for want of witnesses.

As in his life so in his art: Leonardo drew many more male than female nudes, and gave much more careful attention to the male than to the female genitals.

“He had a reputation as a chancer and a scammer,” says Mullin.