Regardless of whether he was emphatically gay by the standards of later centuries, evidence that he was self-aware appeared as a notation in his journal: “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” And, yes, his notebooks provide a few accidental glimpses scattered throughout them are obscured images suggesting that Leonardo might not have been sexually binary. True, the figures in his paintings are of fungible gender. True, Leonardo spent his working days with other male assistants and apprentices. In his relentless pursuit of id, ego, and superego, Sigmund Freud was eager at one time to analyze Leonardo’s life in homoerotic terms. Working alongside his fellow artists should have given Leonardo a sense of camaraderie and fellowship instead, he became a master at concealing his personal thoughts. Little is known of his attachment to any one human being if, as has been suggested, he found satisfaction of an intimate nature in the company of men, it wouldn’t have been considered unusual in 15th-century Florence: the word Florenzer, or Florentine, came to mean “sodomite” in German.
This overriding characteristic would have led to the career failure of any other artist, but Leonardo was something more, and it defied summary. His stubborn resistance to finishing the work he began was due to an incessant curiosity. He began no more than twenty pictures in a career that lasted nearly half a century of the twenty, fifteen are agreed to be entirely his of those fifteen, four are, to some degree, incomplete. By the time he was awarded independent commissions, he had become an instinctive procrastinator. Earlier images of him testify that he stayed handsome into middle age, and it is said that as an adolescent he epitomized youthful male beauty: a number of art experts believe him to have been the model for Verrocchio’s 1466 bronze statue of David, the biblical hero who felled a giant with a well-thrown stone.Īt twenty-one, Leonardo enrolled as a member of the city’s Painters’ Guild. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see Leonardo as he appears in the iconic, red-chalked Turin drawing that surfaced in the early 19th century: an old man with deep lines crisscrossing his face, winged eyebrows, and wispy hair. Inside, Verrocchio, along with sometimes up to a dozen of his employees and pupils at various levels of apprenticeships, could be found toiling on a wide variety of deliverables that ranged from paintings, sculptures, mechanical contrivances, musical instruments, theatrical costumes and stage sets, tombstones, and metalwork, including suits of armor. The space was probably dirty and noisy-more utilitarian than inspired-and it likely consisted of a large, open ground floor separated from the outside with an awning, under which were samples of the studio’s wares. Nothing about the work environment might have suggested glamour. His studio was not just a workshop devoted to paintings and statuary: it was a factory of sorts. Trained as a goldsmith, unsurpassed in his skill of rendering ornamental detail, and known for his industry and perseverance, Verrocchio, with his rigorous craftsmanship, cut a path toward a number of artistic pursuits. He was an irrepressible force of nature and fortunate enough to have been nurtured in a time that was daring his country further and further. Revolutions in the sciences and the humanities tend to occur in clusters of extraordinary individuals: Giotto, Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, Marco Polo, and Columbus-all were Italians, each with a key role in paving the way for the future.
The lack of structured schooling makes the abundant body of Leonardo’s entirely self-taught knowledge almost unfathomable. While the couple established their residence in Florence, Leonardo remained in Vinci with his grandparents, whose stolidly middle-class household provided a stability of routine but no formal education.
Leonardo’s father also entered the profession and married the daughter of another notary family. Leonardo’s grandfather had been a notary of repute, as had his great-grandfather.