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Silverfoxesclub-digest In this issue: -The Renaissance
---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Renaissance was a series of literary and cultural movements in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, which began in Italy and eventually expanded into Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe. Participants studied the great civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and came to the conclusion that their own cultural achievements rivaled those of antiquity. Their thinking was also influenced by the concept of humanism, which emphasizes the worth of the individual. Renaissance humanists believed it was possible to improve human society through classical education. This education relied on teachings from ancient texts and emphasized a range of disciplines, including poetry, history, rhetoric (rules for writing influential prose or speeches), and moral philosophy.
(From an essay in French by C. Beurdeley:)
(Note from Ben Boxer: Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola were more than just "friends." Marsilio was thirty years Pico's senior. Pico's brilliant writings were considered heretical, but when he gave away all of his great wealth at the age of 30, Pope Alexander VI absolved him of heresy. Pico died a year later at 31. His silverfox, Marsilio, outlived Pico by five years, but was buried with him in the same grave.) Another of Pico's admirers, Girolamo Benivieni, would send Pico very loving sonnets. The two friends—Pico and Marsilio—claimed that they shared the same soul, and each would sign his letters with both their names...The spiritual love these two esthetes cultivated radiates from their correspondance.
As for the poet Politian, he claims that whenever he glimpses a certain Buonisegni, "my heart pounds like the bridegroom's when he climbs on to the promised virgin's couch." Such passionate epistles were often followed by refined gifts. Cavalcanti sent a brace of turtle-doves to Marsilio as if the latter were a young girl; Politian presented Lorenzo de' Medici with baskets of lilies and roses. Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Politian met frequently, for each owned a house near Fiesole. They were invited together to extravagant festivities given by rich patrons and admirers. Each year on the November 7, Francesco Bandini held a banquet to commemorate Plato's death. Beautiful Cavalcanti would attract all the looks—he who was the "Prince of the Feast"—as he did at Lorenzo de' Medici's gatherings (where, on one occasion, he delivered a brilliant commentary on the speeches of Phaedrus). The Neoplatonic scholars had their own heroes: such as Donate Accajuolo, who was still a virgin at thirty-two, or Michael Verino "who died at the age of nineteen for having wanted to remain chaste." "Oh Paul," wrote the latter to one of his friends, "do you know that the doctors have prescribed intercourse for my health? If that is the price, I would rather not hang on to life." Politian, who astonished his friends with his enormous range of erudition and with his multiple talents, believed that the only sin against nature was virginity. His active sex life seems to have raised eyebrows in his day, but that did not prevent him from being employed as the tutor of Lorenzo de' Medici's children. In his Florentine Anecdotes, Varillas reports that Politian died while playing the lute for a young man whom he loved to distraction.
There are very few writers and intellectuals of the two centuries of the Renaissance who cannot be suspected of homosexuality. Paulus Jovius was called "the Hermaphrodite" because, according to his contemporaries, he was "both man and wife." Francesco Berni, the author of Petrarchan parodies and satiric poems which originated the bernesco style; the physician and mathematician Gerolamo Cardano; Antonio Beccadelli, called la Panoramita, who dedicated his book, The Hermaphrodite, to Cosimo de' Medici; Aretino; Tasso; Machiavelli and countless others all tried their hands at loving—not only the opposite sex. Professor Pomponius Laetus, who liked to walk down from the Esquiline with a lantern in his hand while lecturing youths "in the manner of Socrates," was at a loss to know which way to turn.... There were so many possibilities! As one of Aretino's characters observes, if the fires of Heaven were to punish all those who indulged in the vice against nature, not a single lord or scholar would remain in all of Italy. Why, the Papacy itself.... Rumor had it that Paul II used to paint his face, and it was said that on being elected he had been disappointed at not being allowed to take the name "Formosus I" [the Well-shaped]. It was even whispered that he had died of a heart-attack in the act of sodomy. His successor Pius II nicknamed him "Maria Pientissima," but in his own youth in Siena, when he had written under the pen name Aeneas Silvius, he himself had been friends with people like Beccadelli, the author of The Hermaphrodite. And it was alleged that this same Aeneas Silvius—who had been crowned the Prince of Poets by the Emperor Frederick III—had contributed certain passages to that book, which was reputed to be filled with "obscenities." But like the blue-stocking literary ladies in Moliere's Precieuses Ridicules, these Renaissance intellectuals found the word—obscenity— the "most delightful in all creation." Finally, one might mention a certain opuscule entitled De laudibus Sodomiae [In Praise of Sodomy, 1548], said to be the work of the legate of Venice, Giovanni Casa, who, had it not been for his immoderate love for young men, would certainly have worn the cardinal's hat. In the workshops of the painters and sculptors, "immoral acts," especially homosexual ones, were almost the rule. The youths who shared the living quarters of their masters as apprentices or servants were often shameless. If they had a pretty face, or a well-proportioned body, they would sit as models. Nor was their master's attitude towards them always strictly professional. Witness Verrochio and Lorenzo di Credi whom the former appointed executor of his estate.
In his Notebooks, Leonardo refers to another trouble-causing entanglement with one of his students whom he nicknamed Salai [little devil]. Vasari says that Salai was a pretty lad, "graceful and with a fine head of long, wavy hair." Leonardo, himself of "such physical beauty as transcends all praise," used to choose his students—at least that is what evil-tongues whispered—for their looks rather than for their artistic gifts. Salai, Leonardo complains in his notes, was a liar, a thief and a little glutton; but nevertheless the great painter spoiled him, showering him with beautiful clothes and gifts. On his death, Leonardo left a sizeable estate to Salai although his principal inheritor turned out to be another one of his students, Francesco Melzi.
Then there was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, otherwise known as Sodoma, an eccentric painter who lived with a bizarre menagerie of animals—badgers, squirrels, monkeys and exotic birds—and who made no bones about advertising his sexual proclivities. On one occasion he won a horse-race, and the urchins who had joined in the victory parade having asked him what name they should shout out, Bazzi replied, "Sodoma!" So loud were the cheers that the whole town was alerted; and the painter, galloping away on his Barbary horse with his little monkey hanging on for dear life behind, narrowly escaped being stoned. But the name stuck.
"It is impossible to be more sinful with a chisel," marvelled the connoisseurs. Contrary to habit Michelangelo is said to have made this statue from a live model, whose name has not come down to us (see p. 83). The great sculptor and painter was certainly not short on models. In a letter written in 1515 to Nicolo Quaratei, he recounts that a man came to him one day asking him to accept his son as an apprentice. Michelangelo refused, whereupon the man tried to prevail on him by saying that if he took the boy he could keep him "not only in his house but also in his bed." Michelangelo replied gently that "regretfully he would forgo that consolation, not wanting to deprive the old man of it."
The love affairs which Michelangelo alludes to in his sonnets were generally unhappy ones. In 1522 the artist fell in love with Gherardo Perini, who is perhaps the vigorous youth in "Victory" trampling the old man, who resembles Michelangelo himself. (See p. 83). Two years later they broke up, and Michelangelo lamented in one of his unfinished poems:
"From this very stone did I see him take wing, The sculptor's other great passion was a certain Febbo di Poggio, a capricious young man who was forever asking for money. Then there are the sonnets on the death of Cecchino dei Brazzi, the son of an exiled Florentine, who died at the age of fifteen and was the idol of the aptly named banker-poet Luigi del Riccio. These poems are thought to have been inspired by Luigi's grief. Michelangelo also nourished a Platonic and very courtly passion for Vittoria Colonna, a great but rather ugly lady seventeen years his junior who died in 1547. But, as Vasari observes, "more than anyone he loved Master Tommaso Cavalieri, a gentleman from Rome who was inclined to the arts at a very tender age." This was a chaste love according to most of Michelangelo's contemporaries (except for the poet Aretino who drops poisonous hints about this friendship in his acrimonious exchange with the sculptor). Anyway, Michelangelo died holding Tommaso's hand in 1564. It would take up too much space if we were to list all the artists of the Renaissance who are thought to have had homosexual involvements. However, we mustn't leave out Benvenuto Cellini who, though he carefully avoids referring to these incidents in his autobiography, went on trial no less than three times for the crime of sodomy. Like Caravaggio he had a fatal weakness for ne'er-do-wells encountered in taverns or on the street. To one lord who complained of Cellini's dissolute ways and marvelled at the Pope's forbearance, Paul III replied: "You must realize that men who are past-masters in the arts like Benvenuto are not subject to ordinary laws...." Admittedly, Paul III had reasons for being soft on sodomites: his bastard son Peter was rumored to have been killed for having attempted to rape a handsome bishop. Notwithstanding the denunciations dropped into the tamburo, the artists of the Renaissance were able to pursue their proclivities without having to worry much about legal reprisals (such as being burned at the stake). As they grew old, the painters and the sculptors solicited gratifications from their young students which they considered mere peccadilloes, "little sins which a drop of holy water washes away." So notorious were the morals of the artists that in one of his Satires Ariosto mentions a facetious saying among common people that "it is as dangeous to turn your back to a painter as it is to share his bed." The intellectuals and the writers—particularly the devotees of Socratic love—viewed Antiquity as the lost Paradise which they wanted to restore in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. After centuries of Christian asceticism and harsh discipline, the aristocracy eagerly embraced the new spirit of paganism. Wealthy lords named their sons Achilles or Agamemnon; Filippo di San Gemignino changed his name to Callimachus; a member of the renowned Sanseverino family had himself called Julius Pomponius Laetus. On holidays satyrs, nymphs and crowned youths got up as ancient gods paraded through the towns on elaborate horse-drawn floats.
Gradually Neoplatonic philosophy supplanted the Mediaeval systems of thought. Not only were the souls of the saints considered beautiful, but so were their bodies (for is not physical beauty the reflection of inner perfection?). Thus is seemed perfectly natural to paint them unclothed, like the adolescents of Arcadia, or the god Adonis, or the athletes of Greece and Rome. Saint John the Baptist was represented as a bold shepherd lad, David as a gladiator, Saint Sebastian as a strangely disquieting androgyne. According to some a painting of that saint by Fra Bartolomeo had to be removed from a church because it was giving the monks ideas. In Sodoma's version he appears as an updated hermaphrodite with ringleted hair and sweetly langorous limbs. The fleshier Saint Sebastians make one think of sensual pleasures, of delicious pain, rather than of the rigors of torture. As for the arrow which pierces his side, the symbolism is obvious enough. More than one mind has been haunted through the ages by sado-masochistic fantasies inspired by the saint's legend. In "Confessions of a Mask" the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima describes his trances of vicarious feeling on seeing Guido Reni's Saint Sebastian, and he confides that in order to identify more closely with the saint he had a picture of himself taken in the same pose. Which shows how the old myths persist in our technological age even to conquering new media. Invented by the Greeks to justify the love between men and youths, the myth of Ganymede was reinterpreted in the Renaissance to symbolize the ascent of the soul, or the "divine fury" which took hold of a saint—or even divine charity (with Christ as the eagle and the saint as the shepherd). For Dante Ganymede was the mens humana, the Intellect transported by the Supreme Being to the heights of Contemplation. The adaptation of ancient themes to sacred Christian art allowed the Renaissance artists to express their sensual delight. Sebastiano Veneziano del Piombo, who enjoyed joking, wrote to Michelangelo about the ceiling of the Sistine chapel: "It seems to me that Ganymede would look good in that place—why you could give him a halo and he would be taken for Saint John of the Apocalypse being carried up to Heaven." Savonarola, and later the Council of Trent (1545), violently condemned this Neoplatonic culture with its saints transvestised as ancient gods and its morals reminiscent of Athens in its heyday. Aretino, whose Licentious Sonnets and Ragionamenti did not prevent him from aspiring to the cardinalate, hypocritically proclaimed his indignation at the naked bodies in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" and, one month before the opening of the Council of 1495, he wrote an open letter to the artist declaring: "As a baptized Christian I am ashamed at the licentiousness which you display in your illustration of such a lofty theme...you show angels and saints unrobed, utterly depriving the latter of earthly modesty and the former of heavenly splendor...." Aretino complains that Michelangelo had not followed his advice, and he scolds him for not sending a preliminary sketch of the "Last Judgment." He adds with perfidiousness, "you give your word only to the Gherardoes [Gherardo Perini] and the Tommais [Tommaso Cavalieri] of this world." His parting shot is: "Your kind of painting belongs in a tavern or some obscene bathing establishment, not in the greatest chapel of all Christianity."
   The religious fervor aroused by the Reformation and the Council of Trent poisoned the lives of the artists who had enjoyed the period of freedom and artistic renewal during the late 1400s and the early 1500s. As early as 1550 one of Michelangelo's disciples, Daniel Volterra, was commissioned to cover up the naked bodies in the "Last Judgment"—a job which earned him the nickname braghettone [cod-piece]. After Michelangelo died, El Greco even suggested white-washing the chapel and "redecorating it with something more suitable...." The invasions of Charles VIII and Louis XII brought back ancient art works and Italian paintings to France. Thanks to the discovery of printing, the humanists were able to spread the wisdom of the ancients throughout Europe. In Germany, England and France, where it was already flourishing, homosexuality grew more refined under the influence of Neoplatonism. But after the Council of Trent, intellectuals who did not submit to the laws and doctrines of the Church were suspected of heresy. It became common practice to accuse freethinkers, Protestants and atheists of sodomy—it was the best way of getting rid of them. All the more so as it was easy to support the allegation with proof, or a semblance of proof. Thus Montaigne's former tutor Muretus (Marc Antoine Muret), a mediocre poet and the author of numerous translations and commentaries of Catullus, Tibullus, Terence, etc., was accused in 1552 of having "anti-physical," that is to say unnatural, inclinations. He was locked up in the prison of the Chatelet in Paris, then released thanks to the intervention of friends. In Toulouse, where he then went to teach law at the university, he was re-arrested and charged with committing sodomy with one of his students, some of whose poems he had published. This time he was sentenced to being burned alive, but he managed to escape and he fled to Italy where, despite his homosexual reputation, he was welcomed by Ippolito d'Este and Pope Pius V. Eventually Muretus changed his ways and entered the Church—it was said that he used to have tears in his eyes when he celebrated Mass. About the same time Richard Renvoisy, the cannon of the King's Chapel at Dijon, who had set Anacreon's odes to music, was less fortunate: he was burned at the stake in i 586 for having made the other kind of music with his male singers. In his own writings Montaigne poked fun at the affected—and affecting—Platonism of Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola. His friendship for Etienne de la Boetie, a magistrate, poet and humanist four years younger than himself (Montaigne was twenty-six), was nevertheless "Neoplatonic" in the amorous if not the erotic sense. True, Montaigne writes that love in the "Greek style" is abhorrent—but on the other hand, the great humanist was obviously not entirely satisfied with women, for "they have neither sufficient strength of character nor intellectual capacity." He thought that marriage is simply a deal contracted "for other purposes than love." La Boetie died at twenty-nine and, grief-stricken, Montaigne gave vent to the depth of his sorrow in the words of the Latin poets: "Since he could no longer share my days I resolved to give up pleasure and its ways. O, Brother who art sweeter than life, Will I see you no more, whom I love for all time? Ah, Fate has ttolen half my soul away! What am I doing here, I who am the other twain? The muse who whispered into the ears of the French poets of the sixteenth century was rather ribald. The frolics of the young monks and courtiers delighted writers like Rabelais and poets like Ronsard. But others—like Agrippa d'Aubigne—reacted to them with furious indignation. The latter's long poem Les Tragiques and his "Island of the Hermaphrodites" are a far cry from the serene self-examinations of Montaigne. "The way to a king's heart is through a rascal's arse," sputtered Agrippa. "Unconformity" was just as much of a nobleman's vice at the court of England as it was in France. Here for example are a few sentences from one of the numerous anonymous pamphlets of the Elizabethan period. The author complains that the young men of Saint Paul of the Chapel Royal "deck themselves out in satin and silk, and parade about in these clothes. They would do as well to wear them when they celebrate their papist mummeries. Even in the Queen's chapel these depraved youths profane the Lord's service with lascivious contortions of their effeminate limbs, and with the dazzling richness of their dress, as they mime the obscene fables invented by idolatrous and heathen poets."
End of silverfoxesclub-digest V1 #268
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