LEONARDO DA VINCI
1452-1519

Leonardo da Vinci was a supreme example of a Renaissance genius who possessed one of the greatest minds of all times.

Born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452, outside the small Tuscan town of Vinci near Florence, Leonardo was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a woman who may have worked as a servant in the house of Leonardo’s grandparents.

Leonardo’s father did take several wives—each a member of a good Florence family—but for over twenty years he had no other children. Illegitimacy was a commonplace of the time.

Men were proud of making their own way. Some churchmen, condottieri, artists and statemen even boasted that they were born out of wedlock. Illegitimacy didn’t harm the thrusting, self-made men of the Renaissance as most people believed at the time that the fitness of the individual, as well as his worth and capacity, were of more weight than all the laws that prevailed elsewhere in the West. Leonardo never attended public school.

When he turned fourteen, Leonardo joined the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. Five years later he became a member of the guild of St. Luke, a painters’ guild in Florence. Four years later he worked as an independent artist at his own studio in Florence.

He would wear pink to make his complexion look fresher. Most historians say, with an emphasis on his strong homosexuality, that Leonardo had developed a great interest in everything but women in his life. However, he did showed some, if not acute, interest in females as shown in the above painting of “Leda and Swan” as well as “Mona Lisa” (shown later). To prepare for the “Leda and Swan”, Leonardo made several sketches as shown below:

With no interest in women, nobody could have spent hours and hours on the works shown above. Indeed, Leonardo showed interest in any thing and any subject at all around him; he was a man of curiosity. He even showed an acute interest in mathematics and mechanics in particular. He constantly drew birds in flight. Though odd interests in a painter, his desire to know human anatomy made him dissect more than ten human bodies.

The official records show, some say, that he was accused once of some homosexual scrape, and some historians say—probably based on the said official records, whatever they were—that he lacked the usual sensual feelings for women and tended rather to admire strong men. We must be careful of this kind of reasoning because our history has full of lies and disguises.

If you take a close look at the “Leda and Swan”, you can probably sense that the painter, whoever he was, carried a strong sensual feeling for women. If you were a woman-hater, you could never produce such a work—let alone “Mona Lisa”.

The above work clearly tells us about Leonardo’s sexuality more than the so-called “official records”, which might have been forged up by some rivals or enemies of Leonardo. If some historians want to say that Leonardo was a homosexual, then they should better tell us that he was a bisexual.

Let’s hear what he said about his own sensuality for women.

“Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” Leonardo wrote on a page of his notebooks.

Indeed, his notebooks contain thousands of such sketches as shown above. Those sketches display the penetrating observation of nature, particularly of anatomy, engeneering and science. In fact, Leonardo observed, one hundred years before Galileo, that the pendulum might be used to make a clockwork keep equal time. He saw that red light penetrates through mist and that blue light does not. Accordingly, he devised practical rules for giving depth to the painting of landscapes.

Do you know that Leonardo was a black sheep among the Renaissance horde?

 

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