From Art Readings This Week!
He was born on April 15, 1452, in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, the bastard son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl. No surname marked him—da Vinci simply meant “from Vinci.” He arrived in a century pulsing with rebirth. Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was alive with painters, philosophers, and the sparks of rediscovered antiquity. Gutenberg’s press had just begun to churn out Bibles. Columbus would not sail for decades. Yet from the start, young Leonardo seemed untethered to his age.
He received no formal schooling in Latin or Greek—the languages of the learned—and yet, by sheer force of curiosity, he devoured anatomy, botany, geometry, and the movement of the stars. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to the great Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, where he learned to grind pigments, cast bronze, and draw the human form with an exactitude that seemed almost divine.
But Leonardo could never be confined to canvas. He saw the world not as a gallery but as a machine to be understood, dissected, and, if possible, improved. He filled notebook after notebook—thousands of pages in mirrored script—with designs for flying machines, underwater breathing devices, armored vehicles, hydraulic pumps. Most were never built, yet the sketches pulse with such clarity and foresight that they seem torn from the pages of the future.
He studied the cadavers of executed criminals, peeling back the skin to chart the muscles beneath, not to serve art but to solve the mystery of life itself. In one of his more macabre acts of devotion to knowledge, he described in clinical detail the death of an old man, dissected hours after his final breath—“this is the soul,” he mused, “leaving the body.” He painted with maddening slowness, often leaving works unfinished, yet when he did complete them—The Last Supper, The Virgin of the Rocks, The Mona Lisa—they were like revelations in oil, imbued with a psychological depth no artist had ever dared.
By the end of his life, kings and cardinals sought his company not merely for his brush, but for his mind. He spent his final years in France under the patronage of Francis I, who called him “a man who could not be replaced.” There, in the Loire Valley, the great polymath finally slowed. On May 2, 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died, legend has it, in the arms of the French king himself. He left behind no children, no school, and only a handful of finished paintings. But he had cracked open the universe and peered into its workings with a lucidity unmatched in human history. The world would not see his like again.
Another Article on Da Vinci: Gay polymath bastard painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect Leonardo Da Vinci was BOTD in 1452 and died in 1519 at the age of 67. Although his genius was recognized, success largely eluded him in his lifetime. In 1476, a week before his 24th birthday, Leonardo, along with three other young men, were anonymously accused of committing sodomy with a 17-year-old male prostitute named Jacopo Saltarelli. Only 24 and already big with the rough trade. Luckily for Leonardo, one of the other accused had a connection with the powerful Medici; they were all let off under “the condition that no further accusations are made.” But a few weeks later, another anonymous complaint was lodged against the four, again in connection with Saltarelli. No witnesses came forward, and the case was dropped for good.
Although punishments for sodomy could be harsh (including prison, exile, or death), it seems that many other prominent Florentine artists were also known to have been homosexuals (Michelangelo, Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, and Benvenuto Cellini, among them). As Renaissance humanists engaged with rediscovered works by Plato, which celebrated “l’amore masculino,” homosexuality became such a fact of Florentine life that the word Florenzer became slang in Germany for “gay.” Leonardo seemed largely at ease with his homo desires—unlike Michelangelo, who agonized over his own sexuality.
Isaacson reminds us that his homosexuality “probably contributed to his sense of being unconventional.” As in many other aspects of his life, this difference set Leonardo apart. His outsider status enabled his unique brand of creativity, as well as the trailblazing paintings and experiments that have made him such a towering World figure today.
💚Da Vinci- Angelo Incarnato- His Little Devil- Salai
Gian Giacomo Caprotti was Leonardo da Vinci’s companion for 25 years. He was the model for many of da Vinci’s paintings, including St John the Baptist, where you see him smiling playfully for the painter. Some people even believe he was the model for the Mona Lisa! By all accounts, Caprotti both infuriated and captivated the older man. Da Vinci nicknamed him ‘Salai’, meaning ‘little devil’, for his habit of stealing things, lying and playing pranks. Yet Leonardo loved him enough to buy him expensive clothes, and he desired him enough to depict him in 💚Angelo Incarnato, naked, with an erection and the same flirtatious smile on his face.
Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of Batman and Robin enjoying my Patio.
Lastly, here's AI Prediction for the POPE. I will be extremely happy if the AI prediction is correct
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