Gay culture

From the BBC

The men who Leonardo da Vinci loved

We know a great deal about Leonardo da Vinci’s interests in botany and human anatomy; about his explorations of flight, of war machines and the flow of water; of his skills as a painter, and even his reputation for leaving projects unfinished. But what do we know of the man, of his passions, of Leonardo in love? Da Vinci left nothing that could be read directly as a diary or journal: his interest was in the outer, rather than the inner, world. Nevertheless, writers, from the 16th-Century biographer Giorgio Vasari to Sigmund Freud, have scoured the thousands of pages of written notes left by Da Vinci for clues.

Five hundred years after his death – with exhibitions around Europe celebrating his art, engineering, science and ideas – a new opera celebrates a more private side of the Renaissance master. The work of composer Alex Mills and librettist Brian Mullin, Leonardo focuses on the relationship between the great artist and two of his assistants.

Gian Giacomo Caprotti – known by Da Vinci as Salaí aka ‘Little Devil’ – was a boy from a poor background who entered the workshop aged 10 in 1490, when the master was in his late 30s. He immediately made an impression as a troublemaker: Mullin found frequent references to Salaí stealing from him and his guests, or eating more than his master thought respectable. “He [was] a young working-class boy, and evidently very hard to handle, but he ended up staying with Leonardo for 25 years,” says Mullin.

Francesco Melzi came into Leonardo’s life in around 1505. This young man, by contrast, was from a noble Milanese family, and developed a role in the workshop akin to private secretary. He and Leonardo soon developed a closer intimacy that Mills and Mullin liken to father and son. Melzi was, as Mullin notes, “completely different from Salaí in his social standing and his demeanour.” No cheeky nicknames for the aristocratic Melzi: he was addressed by Leonardo as ‘Master Francesco’. 

While Mills’s music for Leonardo is of course contemporary, it has been scored for a viol consort - that is, an ensemble of players of the viol, a stringed instrument evocative of the early 16th Century. Mullin’s libretto is drawn almost entirely from historical sources, most important of which were Da Vinci’s own notebooks, which the left-handed artist wrote in mirror script.

The opera charts the “shifting triangle that Leonardo had with these two young men,” says Mullin. “Leonardo moves from one relationship to the other, and Salaí gets a bit pushed out.” Late in life Leonardo moved to France, with both male companions in attendance, but Salaí returned to Milan, and was not there at the master’s bedside when he died in 1519. “Leonardo leaves him very little: he’s left only half a vineyard, which is odd,” says Mullin. Melzi, by contrast, inherited Leonardo’s notebooks and many of his paintings. “It seems there was a private drama that had been playing out from one figure to another.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191107-the-men-who-leonardo-da-vinci-loved