An Italian writer claimed to have seen a mention in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks of his female lover called “La Cremona”. So his affair with a woman from Cremona was invented in the Romantic age. Photograph: Peter Barritt/Alamyīut for some people that leaves something missing from his life. The most queer bit of painting in Britain … Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, at the National Gallery. The records of the Office of the Night, brilliantly analysed by historian Michael Rocke, reveal that in Leonardo’s day “the majority of local males at least once in their lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations”.Īs for Leonardo, he lived with his entourage of good-looking assistants and pupils, dressed them and himself in luxurious clothes including pink and purple tights, and drew stupendously sensual male nudes.
The sodomy accusation against Leonardo was made to the fantastically named Office of the Night, a unique sex crime agency set up in 1432 to counter what was seen as a specifically Florentine vice. Gossip solidified into social history when documents were found at the start of the 1900s that show Leonardo was accused of “sodomy” before Florentine magistrates in 1476.Īll the evidence is that men having sex was common in the art workshops of Renaissance Florence. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, suggests he was besotted with his male assistant Salaì, “who was most comely in grace and beauty, having fine locks, curling in ringlets, in which Leonardo delighted”.
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His reputation for loving men has never been hidden and the TV series does depict his replationships with men. What was it he found so mysterious about her? But no solid evidence exists that he ever had a romantic relationship with a woman – either sexual or platonic. It’s said he got musicians to play and entertained her with jokes when she posed for the painting we know as the Mona Lisa. Most fascinatingly, there was his encounter with one Lisa, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. He was also friends with Isabella d’Este, ruler of Mantua and art connoisseur. He clearly got on well with Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of the ruler of Milan, whom he portrayed holding a very phallic pet mink, perhaps to symbolise her power over men. If the makers of Leonardo wanted a strong woman character, they had plenty of historical options. Phallic … Lady With an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, 1489-90.