Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 - 1519) Italy
Artist, scientist & painter
Leonardo and his lover Salai
 The ultimate renaissance man, Leonardo was felt to represent not only humanity but also divinity itself. His famous drawing of Vitruvius Man demonstrates the perfection of the proportions of the human figure. Besides his amazing notebooks, he created the most famous religious painting in the world and, of course, the most famous portrait ever.
Considered one of the greatest artists and innovators of all time, Leonardo da Vinci not only painted the famous "Mona Lisa" but thousands of other works. His extensive anatomical drawings led to a wider knowledge of the human body. While academic talk opened and closed his closet door to suit whatever morals the times mandated (he was born in 1452 and died in 1519), the accepted common knowledge is that during the Renaissance, older unmarried men -- and even married men -- had sexual relations with young men. Da Vinci was no exception.
 Imprisoned twice for same-sexual misconduct, in April 1476, da Vinci was accused of sodomy with a 17-year-old named Jacopo Saltarelli. Leonardo's father refused to help, but his uncle enlisted the aid of Bernardo di Simone Cortigiani, an influential Florentine, to have the charges dismissed, but only after Leonardo spent two months in jail. At one point later in life, Leonardo adopted a ten-year old boy, Giacomo Caprotti, nicknamed Salai; their twenty-five year relationship was anything but typical of fathers and sons. Among Leonardo's notes is a long-running list of items stolen from him by the mischievous Salai. When Leonardo died, he left a bequest for Salai, but he left his drawings, papers, and notes to his final lover and companion: a young nobleman named Francesco Melzi.
 Despite the scandal, the relationship between da Vinci and Salai must have been fruitful. The artist enjoyed the company of the younger man for years, continuing a centuries-old tradition of benefactor and protegée.
We always think of Leonardo like this famous self-portrait, but you figure he must've been young once. The following is from Serge Bramly's great book about him:
No other personality was so intimidating, no other career so difficult to encompass, so biographers often resort to the assumption that Leonardo embodied some superhuman quality: "il divino". Vasari (a contemporary biographer of Leonardo) writes
"there is something supernatural in the accumulation in one individual of so much beauty, grace, and might. With his right hand he could twist an iron horseshoe as if it were made of lead. In his liberality, he welcomed and gave food to any friend, rich or poor."
His kindness, his sweet nature, his eloquence ("his speech could bend in any direction the most obdurate of wills") his regal magnanimity, his sense of humor, his love of wild creatures, his "terrible strength in argument, sustained by intelligence and memory," the subtlety of his mind "which never ceased to devise inventions," his aptitude for mathematics, science, music, poetry. What's more, Leonardo was a man of "physical beauty beyond compare."
How do we know Leonardo was gay?
  When he was twenty-four years old, Leonardo was arrested twice, along with several young companions, on the charge of sodomy. No witnesses appeared against them and eventually the charges were dropped. It must be said that often anonymous charges like this were brought against people just for a nuisance. Renaissance Florentines didn't make the distinctions we make about sexuality today and apparently it was common for young men to get into sexual relationships; in fact, the word "Florenzer" was German slang for "homosexual". Leonardo had no relationships with women, never married, had no children, and raised many young protégés, including the one nicknamed "Salai" which means "little devil", two sketches of whom are shown here. Salai stole things, broke things, lied, and was generally a, well, little devil; if he were a mere student or servant he would have been sacked. It's not hard to see how this imp would be attractive to Leonardo. He stayed with Leonardo for almost thirty years, and appears many times in Leonardo's sketchbooks. Other lover he had for short periods, like Cesare da Sesto, Giuliano Boltraffio and Giuliano Machiavelli.
 Leonardo's friend Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman who is famous for his advocacy of unscrupulous political opportunism, had a son, Ludovico, who apparently had a boyfriend. Machiavelli wrote to a friend to ask what he should do about it. The friend, who was Florence's ambassador to the Papal Court, replied:
"Since we are verging on old age, we might be severe and overly scrupulous, and we do not remember what we did as adolescents. So Ludovico has a boy with him, with whom he amuses himself, jests, takes walks, growls in his ear, goes to bed together. What then? Even in these things perhaps there is nothing bad."
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