ART & CULTURE The Untold History

THE UNTOLD HISTORY

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio: the history that is not told during tours that we can finally listen to with our heads high.

by Titta Gruppo

Traveling to Italy is, for many people, a way of finding one’s roots. Opening a book by Virgilio, the yearning to discover the stories of Homer along the coasts of the South, to find in Florence the saving love of Dante, the atmosphere of Tintoretto in the sunsets of Venice.Michelangelo - The Final JudgementMany foreigners, book in hand, come to see what they already know, and often are surprised to read in the their guide-books that Michelangelo “was married to his art”, or “tormented by the love for a woman who would not repay it “attributed by imaginative biographies transposed, also, on the big screen. But what hurts cultured people, voted to

Leonardo - The Last Supper

the opening of the mind, are the documentaries: enjoyable, perfect, with glaring omissions about the love of Michelangelo or Leonardo for men. No one mentions the model and pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, Gian Giacomo Caprotti known as Salai, while everyone makes assumptions about alleged links between Leonardo and the “woman” portrayed as the Mona Lisa, or the apostle –Magdalene. Instead the homosexuality of great artists should be a new point of view for study and further critical analysis. Millions of gay men, and people who are not content with a distorted version of history, have appeared in churches and museums to see “their” history, the real one, to find clues of cultural freedom. According to Quiiky- the first Italian gay-friendly tour operator- it is time to come out of this segregation to a pluralistic opening, and not only literate. “The Untold History” - the name of this Quiiky tour- marks the change. No longer will such an

Apollo Belvedere

important aspect of these artists’ lives be omitted. Someone, finally, has the courage to say out loud that Michelangelo was gay, and it’s not a matter of prudery or injury to the obvious. Michelangelo loved men as evidenced by his passionate poems. We can notice that his women portrayed in the Sistine Chapel are massive and sculptural, with male bodies. For this a mighty Christ involves the vortex of salvation as a pair of men kiss in Paradise. And before Michelangelo it is not that gays didn’t exist in art. We took refuge in search of the San Sebastiano of art, icon of boyish beauty. A style that we can find in portraiture by Leonardo. The conception of beauty is expressed by Da Vinci in the androgynous features, almost feminine, of Salai, that we see in the portrait of John the Baptist, and St. John, who sits at the right hand of Christ in the Upper Room. Humanism’s favourite son, Leonardo, sees homosexuality as a relationship between philosopher and pupil, protector and scholar. Caravaggio, bisexual, by contrast, took prostitutes and made them into Madonnas with filthy feet; he took his “boys” from brothels to make young San Giovanni out of them, beefy and beardless.

Guido Reni - San Sebastiano

Leonardo - Salaì portrayed as John the Baptist Caravaggio - Young Sick Bacchus

The genius beloved by gay boys is Michelangelo, for his inner torments of spirit and body that are characteristic of youth. The same that the artist transferred to the bodies he depicted in his paintings. Sculptural paintings, flesh as stone touched by divine love. The same love that Michelangelo felt for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman for whom he wrote many wonderful poems. The same homosexuality that put artists in a synthesis of male and female, heaven and earth, flesh and spirit, and what for others was darkness and for them was elective light. And in some cases, someone like Michelangelo, with a pope like Julius II, knew that he could finally afford to “dare” to come forward, even in the Sistine Chapel. This is because at the dawn of the 1500, Julius II did not care about Michelangelo’s homosexuality: for he was a genius. And it should be the same for us. We should not try to create fictitious heterosexual love stories for him: he was gay, and proud of it, and the Pope did not have any trouble with it. The Pope had that open mind that in Milan, in other respects, we can find with the Sforza family. And today? It seems incredible that even when the Pope embraces a transsexual person and says “who am I to judge?” five hundred years later, there is someone who is ready to pass judgment.