To the officers of the Signoria: I hereby testify that Jacopo Saltarelli, the brother of Giovanni Saltarelli, lives with him at the goldsmith’s shop in Vacchereccia, directly opposite the buco; he dresses in black, and is seventeen years old or thereabouts. This Jacopo pursues many immoral activities and consents to satisfy those persons who request such sinful things from him. And in this manner he has performed many things, that is, he has provided such services to many dozens of persons of whom I have good information, and at the present time I name some of them. These men have sodomized the said Jacopo and so I will swear.
The informer provides the names of four of Jacopo’s alleged consorts or customers. They are:
Bartolomeo di Pasquino, goldsmith, living on Vacchereccia
Lionardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, living with Andrea del Verrocchio
Baccino the doublet-maker, living near Orsanmichele, in that street with the two large wool-shearers’ shops leading down to the loggia of the Cierchi; he has opened a new doublet shop
Lionardo Tornabuoni, alias ‘I1 Teri’, dressed in black
Against these four names is written, ‘absoluti cum conditione ut retamburen-tur’. This indicates that they were at liberty pending further inquiries, and that they were obliged to attend the court when summoned. They did so two months later, on 7 June. It seems the case against them was formally dropped.103
This rather lurid document was first published in 1896, but had certainly been known about before that. In the fourth volume of his edition of Vasari, published in 1879, Gaetano Milanesi refers to ‘certain charges’ against Leonardo but declines to say what they were. Jean-Paul Richter and Gustavo Uzielli similarly refer to an unspecified crime: Uzielli calls it a ‘malicious rumour’. When the denuncia was finally published by Nino Smiraglia Scognamiglio, he was at pains to say that Leonardo was ‘above suspicion’ in the matter, and was ‘a stranger to any form of love that was against the laws of nature’.104
Since Freud, and subsequent studies like Giuseppina Fumagalli’s Eros e Leonardo, this initial period of denial seems quaint. It is now widely accepted that Leonardo was homosexual. At least one of his early biographers, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, is explicit on the subject: in his Sogni e raggionamenti of c. 1564 he imagines the following dialogue between Leonardo and Phidias, the great sculptor of antiquity. Phidias asks Leonardo about one of his ‘favourite pupils’:
PHIDIAS: Did you ever play with him that ‘backside game’ which Florentines love so much?
LEONARDO: Many times! You should know that he was a very fair young man, especially around the age of fifteen.
PHIDIAS: And are you not ashamed to say so?
LEONARDO: No! Why should I be ashamed? Among men of worth there is scarcely greater cause for pride…105
Lomazzo is particularly referring to Leonardo’s relationship with his Milanese pupil Giacomo Caprotti, known as ‘Salai’. Vasari is more discreet, but his description of Salai probably trails the same idea: ‘He was extraordinarily beautiful and comely, with lovely curling hair which Leonardo adored.’ The adjective Vasari uses – vago: comely, pretty, charming – probably contains an overtone of effeminacy. Other young men flit into view in contexts suggestive of homosexuality – an apprentice called Paolo; a young man called Fioravanti: we shall meet these later. And while the preponderance of male nudes in Leonardo’s sketchbooks is conventional, some of his drawings are frankly homoerotic. The obvious instance is the so-called Angelo incarnato, with its full-frontal erection (see page 468). This drawing is in turn related to the Louvre St John, probably his last painting: a meltingly poetic study of an androgynous-looking young man, with the cascading curls which he ‘adored’ in Salai, and which are a constant in his work from the first studio paintings of the early 1470s.
There are some who would like to keep Leonardo’s sexuality in this poetic, Pateresque mode of shimmery young angels and androgynes, but they have to contend with such documents as folio 44 of the Codex Arundel, which has a kind of vocabulary list consisting of punning variants of the word cazzo, an impolite term for the penis; or the drawing in one of the Forster notebooks which Carlo Pedretti has nicknamed Il cazzo in corso (The Running Cock); or the recently recovered verso of a fragment in the Codex Atlanticus which features two phalluses, with legs attached so they look like cartoon animals, one of which is nudging with its ‘nose’ a circle, or hole, with the name ‘Salai’ scribbled above it. The latter graffito is not by Leonardo, but suggests what passed for humorous comment among his pupils and apprentices.106
It is all, in the end, a matter of interpretation. Like most students of Leonardo today, I interpret him as homosexual – though there is some piquant evidence, which I will look at later, that he was not exclusively so. The allegation laid against him in 1476 is plausible enough, though this is not the same as saying it was true.
What did it mean to be gay in Quattrocento Florence?107 Predictably, the answer is complex and ambiguous. On the one hand, homosexuality was widespread, as is suggested by Lomazzo’s dialogue, where the ‘backside game’ of sodomy is particularly associated with Florence; the Germans went as far as to use the word Florenzer (Florentine) to mean a sodomite. In Medici circles, homosexuality was openly tolerated: the sculptor Donatello, the poet Poliziano, the banker Filippo Strozzi were all known to be gay. Botticelli was reputed to be, and like Leonardo he was the subject of an anonymous denuncia; and among later gay artists there were Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini. The latter was apparently omnivorous: he recounts his heterosexual conquests with gusto in his autobiography, but it is a fact that in 1523 he was fined by the Florentine magistrates for ‘obscene acts’ with one Giovanni Rigogli. Accused by the sculptor Bandinelli of being a ‘filthy sodomite’, Cellini replied with a flourish, ‘I wish to God that I knew how to exercise such a noble art, for we read that Jupiter practised it with Ganymede in paradise, while here on earth it is practised by the greatest emperors and kings.’108 This catches, if ironically, the same idea which Lomazzo gives to Leonardo in his dialogue: that homosexuality is a ‘cause for pride’ among ‘men of worth’.
Another factor is the Florentine craze for Platonism. Plato’s ideal of love between men and boys was well known; there is much about this in Ficino’s De amore, and though Ficino stressed it as chaste and asexual, it is clear that ideas of ‘Platonic’ or ‘Socratic’ love served as a fashionable disguise for homosexuality. We have found Leonardo close to the Ficino circle: a congenial tone of refined male eroticism may have been one of its attractions.
All this gave a new gloss to homosexuality in 1470s Florence, but not one that was recognized by the vice-hunting Officers of the Night. Sodomy was nominally a capital crime, punishable (in theory but almost never in practice) by burning at the stake. A statistical survey of Office of the Night prosecutions shows that over a 75-year period (1430–1505) more than 10,000 men were charged with sodomy – a rough average of 130 a year. Of these, about one in five was found guilty. A few were executed; others were exiled, branded, fined or publicly humiliated.109 Thus the charges levelled against Leonardo in 1476 were by no means uncommon, and by no means trifling. He was almost certainly arrested; he was in danger of savage punishment. Between the philosophical languors of Platonic love and the holding-cells of the Office of the Night is a long drop.
Prosecution, moreover, was the sharp end of a more general disapproval among the God-fearing majority. Homosexuality was routinely denounced from the pulpits, though not all went as far as the preacher Bernardino da Siena, who exhorted the faithful to spit on the floor of Santa Croce and shout, ‘Al fuoco! Bruciate tutti i sodomiti!’ (‘To the fire! Burn all sodomites!’) Things got worse in 1484, when a papal bull effectively stigmatized homosexuals as diabolical: their ‘heretical perversions’ were on a par with having ‘carnal knowledge with demons’, as witches were said to do. Those of a literary turn could read of the eternal punishment meted out to homosexuals in Dante’s Inferno. In the seventh circle of hell are found the ‘v
iolent against God, Nature and Art’ – respectively blasphemers, sodomites and usurers. The sodomites, a ‘wretched crew’ (turba grana) or ‘filthy scum’ (tigna brama), are condemned to wander round in an endless circle across a ‘burning desert’. Both the desert and the self-completing circle (‘fenno una rota di se’: ‘they made of themselves a wheel’) are an image of sterility: sodomy is a taboo – a ‘violence against nature’ – because non-generative.110 In this more subtle Dantesque reading – more so than in the homophobic rantings of the preachers – lies real disquiet. Leonardo knew the work of Dante, and quotes from him in the notebooks. He would also know Botticelli’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy – the earliest drawings probably date from the 1470s; some engravings based on them were included in Landino’s edition of Dante, published in Florence in 1481. We have only the later series, done in the mid-1490s for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici,111 but its image of naked homosexuals tormented with firebrands and shuffling around in a circle like an eternal chain-gang tells us something of the guilt and foreboding that might haunt a sensitive young man under arrest for sodomy.
This is the backdrop of the denunciation handed in to the authorities in April 1476. We know nothing for certain of its motives except this: it was intended to cause trouble for Jacopo Saltarelli, and for the four men accused of consorting with him. It was an act – or anyway the first stage of an act – of criminalization.
Who was Jacopo Saltarelli? His accuser tells us that he was about seventeen, and had a brother called Giovanni, with whom he lived and worked at a goldsmith’s shop on the Vacchereccia. In the Florentine catasti we find the Saltarelli to be a numerous clan clustered within a precise area, the Gonfalone Carro, of the Santa Croce quarter: of the seven Saltarelli families listed in the 1427 register, six are from this gonfalone. The wealthiest of these is Giovanni di Renzo Saltarelli, assessed at 2,918 florins; his occupation is given as vaiaio o pellicaio, a dealer in furs, and especially in the grey-blue squirrel fur called vaio. In 1427 Giovanni had seven dependants, and a generation later, in the catasto of 1457, we find three of his sons, Bartolomeo, Antonio and Bernardo, still living in the same neighbourhood.112 It seems likely that Jacopo Saltarelli was of this clan; if so, he too probably grew up in the neighbourhood of Santa Croce, where Leonardo also lived and worked.
One notes how intensely parochial are this denuncia and its references. Two of the accused, Saltarelli and Pasquino, live and work on the Vacchereccia. (It is not quite clear from the phrasing whether they live and work
The torments of homosexuality. Detail from Botticelli’s illustration of the seventh circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
in the same goldsmith’s shop or in neighbouring ones.) The informer is a local man too, for the shop where Jacopo works is described as standing opposite the buco or tamburo, presumably meaning the one into which the report was posted. The Vacchereccia is the short, wide street leading out of the south-western corner of the Piazza della Signoria. A couple of blocks to the north is Via dei Cimatori, where another of the accused, Baccino the doublet-maker, lives. The denuncia is at the level of a nosy neighbour scandalized by certain comings and goings. Or perhaps the neighbour is a competitor. Another goldsmith’s shop on the Vacchereccia was owned by the artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo; he declares it among various ‘small possessions’ in his tax return of 1480. It was run by Paolo di Giovanni Sogliani, who is described as Pollaiuolo’s ‘painter and assistant’.113 Is it possible the accusation was posted by Sogliani, thus conveniently causing problems for two rival goldsmiths, Saltarelli and Pasquino, and for a rival painter, Leonardo? The use of the anonymous denuncia against business rivals remains a feature of Italian life to this day.
The odd man out is the last-named on the list of sinners: Leonardo Tornabuoni, or ‘Il Teri’. No address is given for him, probably because everyone in Florence knew that you found a Tornabuoni at the Palazzo Tornabuoni, on the wide and well-appointed street running up from the Ponte Santa Trinità. The Tornabuoni were one of the leading families in the city. Their long alliance with the Medici was cemented in the early 1440s by the marriage of Piero de’ Medici to Lucrezia Tornabuoni. She was much loved by the chroniclers and commentators: affectionate, witty, a poet and a businesswoman – the kind of new Florentine woman who paved the way for women like Ginevra de’ Benci of the next generation. Lucrezia’s brother Giovanni was the manager of the Rome branch of the Medici bank, but was also linked to the Medici’s old antagonists the Pitti through his marriage to Luca Pitti’s daughter Francesca. It was Giovanni who commissioned the wonderful Ghirlandaio frescos in Santa Maria Novella. Various Tornabuoni can be seen there, caught by Ghirlandaio’s camera; perhaps Leonardo Tornabuoni is among them.
The Tornabuoni were a large family, and this Leonardo has not been precisely identified, but the fact that he is some kind of relative of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s mother seems to add another dimension to the proceedings. Some have wondered if there are political cross-currents at work. Has Leonardo da Vinci got caught up in some kind of smear campaign against Leonardo Tornabuoni, and through him the Medici? Like my own slur against Pollaiuolo’s shop-manager, this remains uncorroborated. What perhaps seems more likely is that the Tornabuoni–Medici connection adds a dimension of influence after the event: that certain words would have been whispered in certain ears to ensure that the affair was dealt with swiftly and discreetly. The word ‘absolved’ next to Leonardo’s name tells us that the charges against him were dropped. It does not tell us that he was innocent of them, and the presence of a Medici protégé on the charge-sheet makes it quite probable that it was influence rather than innocence that got him off.
According to the informer, Jacopo Saltarelli ‘consents to’ sex and has ‘provided such services to many dozens of persons’. It is not quite clear whether Jacopo is being presented as a promiscuous young homosexual or as a male prostitute. This distinction is imprecise, but seems important: is Leonardo consorting with a lover or visiting a rent-boy? On the whole the tone seems quite upmarket: the Vacchereccia is a good address, where Saltarelli is gainfully employed as a goldsmith’s apprentice or assistant. There is also that sleight of hand so common in informers’ reports – there are supposedly ‘many dozens’ of visitors, but only four of them have names and faces. Four lovers do not exactly make a boy a prostitute, even if he receives certain gifts from them afterwards.
When Smiraglia Scognamiglio first published the denuncia, in 1896, he conjectured that Leonardo had been unjustly accused because he had used Saltarelli – innocently – as a model. This is certainly plausible, though now we accept the truth of Leonardo’s homosexuality we might think of the artist–model relationship as a context rather than an exculpation. The possibility that Jacopo served Leonardo as an artist’s model is strengthened by a cryptic note which Leonardo wrote, and then crossed out, on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus. The sheet is datable to around 1505, and the words that Leonardo wrote are these: ‘Quando io feci domeneddio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s’io lo fo grande voi mi farete pegio’ – ‘When I made a Christ-child you put me in prison, and now if I show Him grown up you will do worse to me.’114 This is very hard to interpret, but one reading would be that the Christ-child was a work for which Jacopo had posed as a model; that this had caused problems with the Church authorities when Jacopo was denounced as a homosexual; and that similar problems were now brewing over a painting or sculpture showing the ‘grown-up’ Christ. The only extant work of Leonardo’s that could be described as a ‘Christ-child’ is the terracotta head of the Youthful Christ, which is plausibly dated to the 1470s. Is this Jacopo, with the long hair and the downturned eyes, and that ‘air’ – in the words of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo – ‘which may be the tenderness of youth, but which seems also old’?
Another young man who strikes me as a possible image of Jacopo is seen in a drawing in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (page 123). This certainly emanates from the Verrocchio circle, and has been attribu
ted to both Verrocchio and Leonardo. It shows a very pretty, round-faced youth with thick ringletted hair; his full lips are in a slight pout which, together with the languidly hooded eyes, gives him a smouldering look and a general air of arrogant self-esteem. The drawing, in three-quarter profile, has an odd affinity with the Virgin of Leonardo’s Annunciation, raising the same kind of disturbing crossover between homoeroticism and sacred subjects as the Youthful Christ. A Verrocchio drawing in Berlin probably shows the same model. This too was once attributed to Leonardo, whose name is written in a curatorial hand in the bottom right-hand corner. It is pricked for transfer, and may be an early study for one of the angels in the Fortaguerri monument, commissioned in 1476. He is, at any rate, the kind of pretty young model who sits for the artists of Via Ghibellina, and if certain ‘sinful things’ were suggested he looks like he might consent to them.
Terracotta head of the Youthful Christ, attributed to Leonardo.
The idea that Leonardo’s riddling comment about the Christ-child refers back to the Saltarelli affair would suggest that the denuncia of 1476 led to a period of imprisonment. It was probably brief – perhaps only arrest and detention by the Officers of the Night – but it would have left its mark. It adds a certain edge to some curious contraptions which Leonardo drew and described for releasing men from prison. They are found in the Codex Atlanticus – a machine for ripping the bars off a window, and another captioned ‘To open a prison from the inside’.115 (p. 147) They date from around 1480. They are among Leonardo’s earliest inventions, and they perhaps relate to this captivity experienced in 1476, and still on his mind thirty years later: ‘you put me in prison.’ Freedom, Leonardo once wrote, is ‘the chiefest gift of Nature’,116 and everything we know about him suggests that confinement of any kind – physical, professional, intellectual and indeed emotional – was irksome to him.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 15