Leonardo’s artistic output between 1472 and 1476 is very scant and no works have survived that can be ascribed to him with any certainty, apart from the few that have been examined to date. In those years the young man appears to have dedicated himself to his studies, to his experiments, and to… bad company.
On the morning of 9 April 1476, an anonymous denunciation was deposited in the box used for this purpose by the Office of the Night (its full title was Ufficiali di notte e Conservatori del onestà dei monasteri) accusing Leonardo and some other young men from good families of sexually abusing a goldsmith’s apprentice who was only 17 years old:
I notify to you, the Night Officers, that it is true that Jacopo Saltarelli, blood brother of Giovanni Saltarelli, lives with the goldsmith in Vacchereccia opposite the basement shop; he dresses in black and is aged 17 or thereabouts; the said Jacopo is involved in many miserable matters and allows those who ask him to satisfy themselves in similar sinful acts, and in this way he has committed many things, namely served several dozen individuals, whose identities I know, and in the present letter I will mention some of them. Bartholomeo di Pasquino goldsmith, who lives in Vacchereccia, Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci, who lives with Andrea del Verrocchio, Baccino doublet maker, who lives near Orto San Michele … Lionardo Tornabuoni known as Il Teri, dressed in black. These men have committed sodomy with the said Jacopo, and I swear to that.17
The denunciation was analysed by the officers, but they only issued a warning on the following 7 June. The social position of the accused, in particular young Tornabuoni and Leonardo, the son – albeit illegitimate – of a notary working for the Signoria, made it advisable for the censors to limit themselves to a response that would bring no particular consequences. While male homosexuality was quite widespread and tolerated in the city, its brazen display certainly was not.
The gravity of the facts appears to be linked to the age of the boy abused by the men named in the accusation; and from the latter emerges also a certain ostentatious exhibitionism, namely in the ‘black’ clothing deliberately highlighted by the anonymous accuser. Black dress was a sign of elegance in Italian medieval and Renaissance fashion because it was particularly costly to produce black cloth; earlier sumptuary laws had even banned the wearing of black cloth, reserving it for the highest ranking members of society. By dressing in black, the boy who was the focus of this homosexual group was clearly displaying an affected and inappropriate elegance, like young Tornabuoni, although the latter would have been allowed greater liberty on account of his social status. We know that Leonardo, too, drew attention in public through his elegant dress no less than through his handsome looks, even if he preferred colours to black cloth – and certainly that ‘pink, knee-length gown’ known as a pitocco, in which he was seen crossing the city.
The document containing this detailed accusation of sodomy highlights the existence of a semi-clandestine but recurrent practice that involved a network of adults who repeatedly abused a young boy. The boy was certainly consenting, but too young to assume sole responsibility for such goings on. The story is neither new nor original: men who shared so-called ‘deviant’ sexual orientations organized themselves and exchanged information in order to minimize the risk of discovery. In this case, they were artisans acting within their own social circle, protected by the solidarity of their class and by their common inclination. Young Jacopo was an apprentice in a goldsmith’s workshop, and the first man named in the accusation was a goldsmith living in the same street, who had no doubt been able to ascertain whether the boy was willing. The next name is that of another tradesman, a doublet maker or tailor who served the wealthy merchant class; and then there is Leonardo, who in many ways was also linked to this environment, given that he was living in the house of Verrocchio, another artisan. Florentine society was rigidly structured into familial and corporative clans (and all were unquestionably out of bounds to women).
The world Leonardo lived in was a strictly male one, and his closest relations were with Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi and, in this period, perhaps Botticini, another artist in the workshop. The extremely close ties that would unite Verrocchio throughout his life to his pupil Lorenzo di Credi, both of whom were devoted to art with a dedication that excluded marriage, suggest that in Leonardo’s new adoptive and professional family there might have been, if not complicity, certainly tolerance for homoerotic relations. Moreover, this tolerance continued to pervade artistic circles until at least the middle of the following century. Here is not the place to explore further this supposition of homoerotic relations or cover-up that stemmed from inside Verrocchio’s workshop, but the scarce documents that have survived attest to the fact that, already recognized for his outstanding talent as a painter at the age of 25, Leonardo was not particularly productive, lived in his master’s house, and frequented a circle of homosexuals who sexually abused a youthful 17-year-old male prostitute.
The light, or perhaps the shadow, that this denunciation throws on the artist’s young adulthood is not an element to dismiss as prurient curiosity or as an insignificant invasion into his private life, because neither Leonardo’s creative life nor his art can be fully understood without taking his sexual inclination and this predilection for very young boys into account. His style was already marked at this stage by his fascination for adolescent ambiguity, for those indefinite forms, neither too masculine nor too feminine, of adolescents of both sexes, which are also transposed to their emotional attitudes, the real fulcrum of his poetics. An exploration of Leonardo’s sexuality for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of his artistic taste is a very insidious undertaking, given the lack of documents available, but one extremely important step in this direction was taken a century ago, by none other than the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in a study that remains memorable for its rigour and accuracy. A fresh look at that study and at Freud’s brilliant intuitions is facilitated today by the new documents on Leonardo’s life that have come to light.