TThe woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s life is finally getting what she deserves. The new drama Leonardo, which opens on Amazon Prime on April 16, drags Caterina da Cremona out of the shadows. Announced as her “muse” and played by Matilda de Angelis in The Undoing, this forgotten woman from the Renaissance appears in advertising images in an intimate dialogue with Aidan Turner as Leonardo. It looks like they are about to become a complete Poldark.
You may have heard rumors that the great Renaissance man was gay. That’s not the full story, says show writer Steve Thompson. “Some of their relationships were with men; those meaningful relationships, ”he told Variety. “But perhaps the most significant relationship of his life was with a friend who was a woman, with whom he was very close, and we unpacked him. Note that he is claiming a historic basis for the show’s sweeping encounters between De Angelis and Turner. Even though Leonardo is framed as a murder mystery, he claims to use this device to get to the reality of who Leonardo was.
But Caterina is an invention, a fantasy, a complete piece of bullshit, invented by a 19th century romantic and, for some reason, given the highly unconvincing credibility of a modern biographer, Charles Nicholl.
If Leonardo’s creators wanted a strong female character, they had many historical options. He clearly got along well with Cecilia Gallerani, lover of the Milan ruler, whom he portrayed holding a very phallic pet mink, perhaps to symbolize his power over men. He was also a friend of Isabella d’Este, ruler of Mantua and an art connoisseur. The most fascinating is the meeting with Lisa, the wife of Florentine trader Francesco del Giocondo. It is said that he called musicians to play and amused her with jokes when she posed for the painting we know as the Mona Lisa. What did he find so mysterious about her? But there is no solid evidence that he has ever had a romantic relationship with a woman – sexual or platonic.
His reputation for loving men has never been hidden. Giorgio Vasari’s book, The Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, suggests that he was obsessed with his assistant Salì, “who was very beautiful in grace and beauty, had fine hair and curls in curls, in which Leonardo was delighted ”. Gossip solidified in social history when documents were found in the early 1900s that show that Leonardo was accused of “sodomy” before Florentine magistrates in 1476.
All the evidence is that men having sex were commonplace in Renaissance Florence art workshops. The accusation of sodomy against Leonardo was brought to the fantastically called Office of the Night, a unique sex crime agency created in 1432 to combat what was seen as a specifically Florentine addiction. The Office of the Night records, brilliantly analyzed by historian Michael Rocke, reveal that in Leonardo’s day “most local men, at least once in their lives, were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relationships.”
As for Leonardo, he lived with his entourage of handsome assistants and students, dressed them and himself in luxurious clothes, including pink and purple tights, and designed stupendously sensual male nudes.
But for some people it leaves something missing in their life. Therefore, his affair with a woman from Cremona was invented in the romantic era. An Italian writer claimed to have seen a mention in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks of his lover named “La Cremona”. The passage is not in any of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks. And even in the romantic era, it didn’t catch on.
I’m trying to understand why someone would be desperate to dig up this tenuous story. However, one of Leonardo’s modern biographers, Charles Nicholl, tried to resurrect him. Nicholl noticed a single word, “Cremonese”, in a list of names in Leonardo’s papers in the Royal Collection and said it could mean La Cremona. Nicholl then speculates that Leonardo, who was 57 at the time, slept with this sex worker from northern Italy. He cannot have painted nude women without experiencing heterosexual love, he says. It is as if Leonardo’s homosexuality was incompatible with the universality of his art. Now, this will be hammered by television broadcasting in popular culture.
Instead of being dazzled by Turner and De Angelis, why not go to the National Gallery when it reopens and see Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. The most hypnotic figure in him is an angel whose long, curly hair matches Salaì de Vasari’s description and whose pale, tender face is magically androgynous. This angel is the most beautiful and strange painting in Britain. The Leonardo I want to see on the canvas is the man who painted this.