Little is known about Leonardo's intimate relationships from his own writing. Some evidence of Leonardo's personal relationships emerges both from historic records and from the writings of his many biographers.
Pupils Leonardo maintained long-lasting relationships with two pupils who were apprenticed to him as children. These were
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, who entered his household in 1490 at the age of 10, and Count
Francesco Melzi, the son of a Milanese aristocrat who was apprenticed to Leonardo by his father in 1506, at the age of 14, remaining with him until his death. Gian Giacomo was nicknamed
Salaì or
il Salaino meaning "the little devil". The "Little Devil" lived up to his nickname: a year after his entering the household Leonardo made a list of the boy’s misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton". But despite Salaì's thievery and general delinquency—he made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, spent a fortune on apparel, including twenty-four pairs of shoes, and eventually died in a duel—he remained Leonardo's servant and assistant for thirty years. At Leonardo's death he was bequeathed the
Mona Lisa (although it could possibly have been a second work with the same name), a valuable piece even then, valued in Salaì's estate at the equivalent of £200,000. Melzi accompanied Leonardo in his final days in France. On Leonardo's death he wrote a letter to inform Leonardo's brothers, describing him as "like an excellent father to me" and goes on to say: "Everyone is grieved at the loss of such a man that Nature no longer has it in her power to produce." Melzi subsequently played an important role as the guardian of Leonardo's notebooks, preparing them for publication in the form directed by the master. He was not to see this project fully realized, but gathered the
Codex Urbinas.
Sexuality Little is self-revealed about Leonardo's sexuality, as, although he left hundreds of pages of writing, very little of it is personal in nature. He left no letters, poetry or diary that indicate any romantic interest. He never married and it cannot be stated with certainty that he had a sexually intimate relationship with any person, male or female; nonetheless, art historian Raymond Stites suggested that Leonardo was romantically involved with
Cecilia Gallerani who was the subject of his painting
Lady with an Ermine. One of the few references that Leonardo made to sexuality in his notebooks states: "The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions." This statement has been the subject of various extrapolations and interpretations in attempts to gain a picture of his sexuality. He also wrote "Intellectual passion drives out sensuality. ... Whoso curbs not lustful desires puts himself on a level with the beasts." The only historical document concerning Leonardo's sexual life is an accusation of
sodomy made in 1476, when he was almost 24, and still at the workshop of
Verrocchio. Florentine court records show that on 9April 1476, an anonymous denunciation was left in the
tamburo (letter box) in the
Palazzo della Signoria (town hall) accusing a young goldsmith and male prostitute,
Jacopo Saltarelli (sometimes referred to as an artist's model) of being "party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who request such wickedness of him". The denunciation accused four people of sodomizing Saltarelli: Leonardo da Vinci, a tailor named Baccino, Bartolomeo di Pasquino, and Leonardo Tornabuoni, a member of the aristocratic Tornabuoni family. Saltarelli's name was known to the authorities because another man had been convicted of sodomy with him earlier the same year. Charges against the five were dismissed on the condition that no further accusations appear in the
tamburo. The same accusation did in fact appear on 7 June, but charges were again dismissed. The charges were dismissed because the accusations did not meet the legal requirement for prosecution: all accusations of sodomy had to be signed, but this one was not. Such accusations could be made secretly, but not anonymously. There is speculation that since the family of one of the accused, Leonardo Tornabuoni, was associated with
Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Sodomy was theoretically an extremely serious offense, carrying the death penalty, but its very seriousness made it difficult to prove. It was also an offence which was rarely punished in contemporary Florence, where homosexuality was sufficiently widespread and tolerated to make the word
Florenzer (Florentine) slang for homosexual in Germany. A comedic illustration made in 1495 for a poem by
Gaspare Visconti may depict Leonardo as a court lawyer with allusions to his alleged homosexual proclivities. Michael White points out that willingness to discuss aspects of Leonardo's sexual identity has varied according to contemporary attitudes. His near-contemporary biographer Vasari makes no reference to Leonardo's sexuality whatsoever. In the 20th century, biographers made explicit references to a probability that Leonardo was homosexual, though others concluded that for much of his life he was celibate. Elizabeth Abbott, in her
History of Celibacy, contends that, although Leonardo was probably homosexual, the trauma of the sodomy case converted him to
celibacy for the rest of his life. A similar view of a homosexually inclined but chaste Leonardo appears in a famous 1910 paper by
Sigmund Freud,
Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood, which analysed a memory Leonardo described of having been attacked as a baby by a bird of prey that opened his mouth and "stuck me with the tail inside my lips again and again". Freud claimed the symbolism was clearly phallic, but argued that Leonardo's homosexuality was latent, and that he did not act on his desires. However, Freud's premise was based on an erroneous translation of the bird as a
vulture, leading him in the direction of
Egyptian mythology, when it was actually a
kite in Leonardo's story. Other authors contend that Leonardo was actively homosexual. Serge Bramly states that "the fact that Leonardo warns against lustfulness certainly need not mean that he himself was chaste". Michael White, in
Leonardo: The First Scientist, says it is likely that the trial simply made Leonardo cautious and defensive about his personal relationships and sexuality, but did not dissuade him from intimate relationships with men: "there is little doubt that Leonardo remained a practising homosexual". Leonardo's late painting of
Saint John the Baptist is often cited as support of the case that Leonardo was homosexual. There is also an erotic drawing of
Salaì known as
The Incarnate Angel, accepted as being by the hand of Leonardo, which was one of a number of such drawings once among those contained in the British Royal Collection, but later dispersed. The particular drawing, showing an angel with an erect phallus, was rediscovered in a German collection in 1991. It appears to be a humorous take on Leonardo's
St. John the Baptist. Leonardo's folio
Codex Atlanticus includes two pages of drawings by a hand other than Leonardo's, one of which is a crudely drawn sketch depicting an anus, identified as "Salaì's bum", pursued by penises on legs with tails.
Giorgio Vasari described Salaì as "a graceful and beautiful youth with curly hair, in which Leonardo greatly delighted". • He had a close, long-lasting friendship with
Isabella d'Este, a renowned patroness of the arts, whose portrait he drew while on a journey that took him through
Mantua. • The de Predis brothers and collaboration on
Virgin of the Rocks • His relationship with
Michelangelo (23 years his junior) was always tense and ambivalent, as the two had such contrasting characters. • He spent a notable amount of time with his pupils Francesco Melzi and Salaì, particularly later in life. ==Interests==