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Sare : Zoomshare Administrator : An Expression of Me
:::test3::: The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything Vignette for the 3rd Week of April My only visit to Paris, France, was right after graduation from the university. Being a total newcomer to the French capital, I wanted to see the things that I’d heard most about: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc of Triumph, Notre Dame Cathedral, the River Seine, etc. Something that I was not prepared for though, was that Paris was, from the point of view of planning and architecture, an exquisite urban masterpiece. I walked a lot and what I saw getting from point A to point B, was often awe inspiring. Though I’m not an avid visiter of art galleries, I made a point of going to the Louvre because it is one of the most famous galleries in the world. Furthermore, before my Parisian visit, I’d been smitten with impressionists such as Monet and Dégas whom I’d been lead to through my experiences with impressionist composers, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. It didn’t even occur to me that the works of the great impressionists might not be housed at the Louvre. So one morning I set off to visit this magnificent gallery, which I understood to be located on the Right Bank, in the 1st arrondissement. As I’d been advised to do by the handsome young man working at the front desk of my hotel, I entered the Paris metro system near the hotel and got off at the Palais Royal stop. The gallery was only a short distance from there. Upon arriving, I bought an admission ticket, entered, then began to explore. There were plentiful artifacts from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and, from that distant past, works led right up to the mid 19th century. After a few hours of gazing at various sculptures and paintings and reading the accompanying text plaques, I saw a crowd gathered around something. Everyone was all “abuzz.” There were flashbulbs going off. Two uniformed security guards seemed to be protecting something but I couldn’t figure out just what. I managed to navigate closer and closer until finally I saw what the guards were holding the people back from, and what the crowd was trying to see up close and get a snapshot of. It was the Mona Lisa. Unlike other paintings I’d seen at the Louvre, the Mona Lisa was positioned behind a sheet of protective transparent material. I had seen photographs of it many times but finally viewing it up close and real was quite magical, even though the size of the painting was smaller than I’d anticipated (30" X 21"). And yes I did wonder what was behind that pensive smile. Had she just freshened up after an incredible session of love making with a clandestine romancer? Had she just embezzled a fortune and breezed through a police interrogation undetected? And why, I thought, was this work by a Florentine master, the property of France? As fascinating and intriguing as the Mona Lisa, is the artist who created her, Leonardo da Vinci. He was one of the greatest painters and most diverse geniuses of all time. He was a key artist of the Renaissance, the movement that had begun in Italy in the 1300's in which the great Michelangelo also participated. Leonardo and Michelangelo were, in fact, very much artistic rivals. As well as the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s paintings The Last Supper and the Vitruvian Man rank among the best known art works of all time. Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, on the outskirts of the town of Vinci, in Tuscany. He was an illegitimate child, son of a Florentine notary, and a peasant girl. Being a bastard, he did not receive a good education, was barred from becoming a doctor or lawyer, and from learning Greek and Latin, the languages that most books of the time were written in. The fact that he naturally wrote with his left hand and was never corrected was probably because of his low status in society and lack of a good formal education. When Leonardo was 15, his father took him to the nearby city of Florence where Leonardo became an apprentice to a local artist. Though trained as a painter, his interests and achievements expanded into an array of disciplines that are now considered scientific specialties. In a self-study mode, he learned anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, geometry, and optics. He experimented for years with corpses and drew the entire human anatomy. He designed machines and drew plans for hundreds of inventions like the helicopter, parachute and submarine. He watched birds in flight obsessively and then came up with the first principles of aerodynamics, four centuries before earthbound man would take to the skies in flight. In 1476, just as Leonardo was coming into his own as an artist, he was suddenly disgraced by a scandal. Along with three other men, he was accused of sodomy, which in Florence was a criminal offense. Leonardo was 24 years old at the time. The accusation specifically charged him with a homosexual act with one Jacopo Saltarelli, a known male prostitute. The charges were made in April, and, for a time, Leonardo and the other defendants were under the surveillance of Florence's "Officers of the Night," a type of 15th century vice squad. Due to a lack of witnesses and evidence, the charges were dismissed a few months later. Still, the incident appears to have deeply marked Leonardo; after that, his private life became much more secretive and his "mirror writing," which he’d been practicing since childhood, was used to keep his diaries more private. Given that in his mid twenties, Lenoardo went into a state of covertness about his private life, the question remains to this day, “Was Leonardo da Vinci gay?” Here are a few points that might help lead to a probable answer: • The sodomy charge of 1476 is a first suggestion that he might have been. • In Leonardo’s notebooks he wrote that he considered heterosexual intercourse quite unsavory. These notebooks abound in drawings of male nudes. • There is no trace of an intimate relationship with a woman throughout his life • Leonardo had a series of beautiful boy apprentices of apparently little artistic talent. • One of his most frequent models was Gian Giacomo de Caprotti, a youth who came to live with the artist as a boy of ten, and whom Leonardo nicknamed "Salai" -- "Child of Satan." The boy's naughty behavior included, on several occasions, stealing Leonardo’s money and running away. While no artist would normally put up with such a problematic model/apprentice, Salai -- also a frequent subject of note in Leonardo's writings -- stayed with him for nearly twenty years. • Leonardo spent the last decade of his life with one Francesco Melzi, a young nobleman and artist in his own right, often referred to as Leonardo's "most beloved pupil." Melzi became the executor of Leonardo's estate, and inherited all Leonardo’s artworks that had remained in the masters possession. • Finally, Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud concluded in his Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality (1910) that the master was, at the very least, a repressed homosexual. I honestly cannot wait to pay a second visit to Paris, now that I know how numerous the GLBTQ legends are, that have been associated with that great city. My first visit to Paris was characterized by a youthful naiveté. My second, will be anything but that. Leonardo da Vinci 15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519 Leonardo Da Vinci 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519 |
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