{"id":60939,"date":"2019-10-31T15:55:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=60939"},"modified":"2025-09-30T10:35:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T14:35:37","slug":"leonardo-celibate-life","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/leonardo-celibate-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo\u2019s Celibate Life: Avoiding the Office of the Night"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Leonardo\u2019s Celibate Life: Avoiding the Office of the Night\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

It was a pivotal moment in Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s life. In April 1476, a 24-year-old Leonardo was brought before the Office of the Night to answer for his “sins.” If that scenario sounds foreboding, it\u2019s because it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Renaissance, Italian cities established vice squads to suppress homosexual activity. Florence\u2019s Office of the Night was one of them, and they had charged Leonardo with “wickedness” \u2013 a euphemism for sodomy. The Office of the Night offered a financial reward to Florentines who turned in their fellow citizens. Leonardo and three other men had been accused by Jacopo Saltarelli, a goldsmith\u2019s apprentice who claimed to have been a sexual partner of all four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Elizabeth
Elizabeth Abbott<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Leonardo was imprisoned for a few hours, and his legal status was in limbo for about two months. But Elizabeth Abbott<\/a> argues that the experience shaped his sexual life in lasting ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThose were the two worst months of his life,\u201d says Abbott, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto\u2019s Trinity College.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abbott delivered a lecture on Leonardo\u2019s celibacy as part of Cinquecento<\/a>, a year-long celebration of his life and work that Carleton University is staging on the 500th <\/sup>anniversary of his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Life Lived in Danger of Punishment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeonardo lived in real danger of punishment,” she says. “The accusation would have been public, and went to gossip, slander and speculation that tormented Leonardo for years afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author of A History of Celibacy<\/a><\/em> notes that while Leonardo showed great appreciation for male beauty and would likely consider himself to be gay by today\u2019s terminology, the concept of homosexuality as a sexual identity did not exist in Renaissance Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Over the next 40 years of his life, he lived in cities where homosexual activity was policed, but he was never again accused. Abbott points to Leonardo\u2019s fear of the mental degeneration caused by syphilis and a revulsion for orifices and sexual penetration that she observes in his art as being additional factors that would have contributed to a choice to be celibate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat lesson did he learn from his accusation?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost likely that he should not conduct himself in a way that might provoke a similar nightmare. From then on, at the slightest hint of impropriety, he would protest he was being victimized, attacked, maligned and insulted. He would vigorously insist on his childlike innocence of all wrongdoing. After the Saltarelli affair, he intended to be the world’s most cautious man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Nuanced Exploration of Leonardo’s Life and Work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinquecento\u2019s year-long exploration of da Vinci enables a nuanced exploration of his life and work. November is another busy month. On Nov. 4, Italy\u2019s Gruppo Jobel will perform SmarTalk Leonardo da Vinci<\/a>, which brings Leonardo\u2019s work to life through performance art. The University of Ottawa\u2019s Cristina Perissinotto will deliver a lecture on Renaissance polymaths on Nov. 15<\/a>, and this year\u2019s Gerhard Herzberg lecture will feature a lecture on Salvator Mundi<\/a> \u2013 Leonardo\u2019s missing masterpiece — by Martin Kemp, a leading da Vinci scholar and emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re the only university in the world that\u2019s devoted an entire year to Leonardo,\u201d says Angelo Mingarelli, chair of Cinquecento and a professor in Carleton\u2019s School of Mathematics and Statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOther universities and museums devote only a few months.  It helps puts Carleton on the map.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learn more about Cinquecento at: Carleton.ca\/leonardo2019<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a pivotal moment in Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s life. In April 1476, a 24-year-old Leonardo was brought before the Office of the Night to answer for his “sins.” If that scenario sounds foreboding, it\u2019s because it was. During the Renaissance, Italian cities established vice squads to suppress homosexual activity. Florence\u2019s Office of the Night was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":60965,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[28],"cu_story_tag":[1920,1919],"class_list":["post-60939","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-community-partnerships","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-science"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/60939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/60939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97386,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/60939\/revisions\/97386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=60939"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=60939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}