IRENE CAESAR'S ESSAY "LEONARDO THE TRICKSTER" #2
LEONARDO THE TRICKSTER
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN VS. SIGMUND FREUD ON CREATIVITY AND RENAISSANCE
#2
Father Ermine
To solve the mystery of the Kite, it is useful to show how Leonardo uses other and similar signifiers, for example, the one of Ermine, the heraldic symbol of Lodovico Moro43, one of Leonardo's benefactors whom Freud claims to be a "substitute for Leonardo's father" and who left Leonardo, so that Leonardo allegedly copied irresponsibility towards his creations (children) and inability to bring almost all paintings to final conclusion44 from both of his "fathers"45. While Freud is convinced that "there is not a line in Leonardoís notebooks which reveals any criticism of the events of those days, or any concern in them,"46 Leonardo wrote on il Moro, calling him "a plant with its roots in the air to represent one who is at his last":
"Those who trust themselves to live near him, and who will be a large crowd, these shall all die cruel deaths; and fathers and mothers together with their families will be devoured and killed by cruel creatures."47
In his allegorical ìStudies on the Life and Habits of Animalsî, Leonardo introduces the first meaning of Ermine as a symbol of purity and moderation, well-known from old bestiaries and similar to the one given by Niccolo Machiavelli (a close friend of Leonardo) in his allegories on a thousand animals48, but adds the words transforming the moderation into its opposite of ostentatious moderation:
"The ermine out of moderation never eats once in the day; it will rather let itself be taken by the hunters than take refuge in a dirty lair, in order not to stain its purity."49
"Never eats once in the day" hints that Ermine eats a lot, so that any moderation is essential only when the quantity of consumption is substantial. This symbolism combines the external and trivial level of signification used by il Moro himself, with the other, ambivalent and pro-
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vocative level of signification. Leonardo also writes about Ermine and Galeazzo, a legitimate heir of Milanese dukedom, whom il Moro, his uncle, had imprisoned and poisoned:
"Ermine with blood Galeazzo, between calm weather and a representation of a tempest.
Il Moro with spectacles, and Envy depicted with False Report and Justice black for il Moro."50
So Leonardoís portrayal of il Moro destroys the traditional meaning of Ermine symbol. Similarly, in a letter to Piero Soderini, the ruler driven from Florence by the Medici, Niccolo Machiavelli puts the political ambivalence of his time in this way, quite opposite to the heraldic expressions of nobility:
"To give reputation to a new ruler, cruelty, treachery and irreligion are enough in a province where humanity, loyalty and religion have for a long time been common. Yet in the same way humanity, loyalty and religion are sufficient where cruelty, treachery and irreligion have dominated for a time, because, as bitter things disturb the taste and sweet one cloy it, so men get bored with good and complain of ill."51
So Freudians should finally choose between two traditional lines of their argumentation: the first line is Leonardoís alleged indifference to his time, and to good and evil in general; and the second line is Freudian exaggeration of Leonardo's ascorbic interpretation of his time, and good and evil in general. After all, it is inconsistent to represent Leonardo as indifferent to and passionate about these questions at the same time.
Freud just cannot bear the opposites of Leonardo's life and character, the multiplicity of his personalities. To Freud, Leonardoís "feminine delicacy", exterior "peacefulness and his avoidance of all antagonismsî in combination with the severity of Leonardo's secret insights, and the mercilessness of Leonardo's creations, enterprises and features are the proof of Leonardo's ìindifference to good and evilî and ìrepudiation of sexuality."52 Here, "frigidity" means literally the moral, aesthetic, religious and philosophical frigidity of Leonardo. But Freud could have taken Machiavelli, with his exterior ìpeacefulnessî and ìavoidance of all antagonismsî, and compared them with the severity of Machiavelliís secret insights, merci-
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lessness of enterprises and theories with the same result of confusion over ambivalence. Moreover, all these proofs from Leonardo's cruel tricks and frightening jokes, and the just unexplainable presence of jokes and tricks all over the place, and in the very serious researches and theoretical postulations, collapse when we find the same things in the writings of Machiavelli. Actually, Leonardoís humorous writings in his notebooks are the most frustrating part for the Freudians ìas scarcely worthy of so great a mind."53
Machiavelli also wrote a parody on the natural history of animals (being actually a parody on the evils and vices of his time), indecent comedies and bawdy Carnival songs. Explaining the ambivalent way of thinking and writing, Machiavelli wrote in a private letter:
"Anybody who saw our letters, honored friend, and saw their diversity, would wonder greatly, because he would suppose now that we were grave men, wholly concerned with important matters, and that into our breasts no thought could fall that did not have in itself honor and greatness. But then, turning the page, he would judge that we, the very same persons, were light-minded, inconstant, lascivious, concerned with empty things. And this way of proceeding, if to some it may appear censurable, to me seems praise-worthy, because we are imitating Nature, who is variable; and he who imitates her cannot be rebuked."54 (Ital. - IC)
It is essential that Machiavelliís letters of, as well as his jokes and parodies, were of the double nature. Serious letters bore within them the bawdy and lascivious jokes of the Carnival. And his bawdy and lascivious Carnival songs, parodies and jokes bore within them all the frightening and severe knowledge about his time55. So in a Carnival song, Machiavelli writes: "May fear leave you, may enmities and rancors, avarice, pride, and cruelty; in you may the love of just and true honors rise up, and may the world return to that first age."56
Furthermore, some of Machiavelliís jokes are of the same frightening quality: "I saw a lion that had cut his own claws and pulled his teeth too through his own counsels, not good and not sagacious...,"57 as if the overall optimism of the Renaissance is essentially based on the shocking combination of opposite extremes58. One can define this ambivalent method with Leonardoís prophecy "Of Sawyers":
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[Of Sawyers] "There will be men who will move one against another, holding in their hands a cutting tool. But these will not do each other any injury beyond tiring each other; for, when one pushes forward the other will draw back. But woe to him who comes between them! For he will end by being cut in pieces."59
Pleasure attacks pain, and pain attacks pleasure, but they do not change the great and the humble harmony of the ambivalent life of a Trickster. He who cannot see the mutual interde- pendence of two opposites, and so comes between them, is a dogmatic, who will be cut into two parts of real pain and illusory pleasure, which have lost their gauge of counterexample. In his "The Golden Ass," Machiavelli also wrote on this rotation of the contraries in the all-embracing Carnival of life, "and it is and always has been and always will be, that evil follows after good, good after evil."60
In the same way, Freudians, from one side, and art historians, from another, cannot blame Leonardo exclusively for his tragic insights and apocalyptic visions, calling them "sadistic", if we are to find the same ambivalent combination of the Universal Death and Rebirth, Destruction and Creation in Machiavelliís Carnivalesque writings: "Oh, strange events such as never have happened before in the world! Every day many children are born through sword cuts in the womb."61 Freudian (and especially, Eissler's) representation of Leonardo's "Profetie" as "aggressive-sadistic", "lugubrious", "terrifying", with "gloomy spirit" and "over-all weirdness"62, is not convincing, being based on the premise of exclusivity, weirdness and the neu- rotic unfit of Leonardo, i.e., his genius. If there were two people sharing the same opinions, then we cannot reduce the characteristics of one of them to his organic peculiarities.
Then another problem arises -- how to discern Leonardo from Niccolo. If the views they share constitute a tradition, tendency and canon, then in distinguishing between their individual contributions, how can we rely on historical tendency alone? Art historians often use the qualitative method ñ the better the artist is, the more of the definite tendency he expresses. As
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if the better the artist is, the more unilateral he is, and as if one tendency is, by definition, in- compatible with another tendency. And on this point, Kenneth Clark, as well as Schapiro, agree with Freudians, who call Leonardo the paradigmatic case of one-sided, egoistic, lost, disintegrated, so to speak, unilateral personality. Contrary to this, the Renaissance method of a "saw" tells us that Leonardo and Niccolo differed precisely in the scope of the contraries each of them had embraced and in the focal clarity of simultaneous presence in each of the contraries.
When art historians have difficulty in the discrimination of individual features of artists within one type, then to the method of exaggeration (genius as a megaphone of some canon), they apply the method of reduction, falling into the Freudian fallacy of organic peculiarities. So Sir Kenneth Clark explains Leonardoís mirror writing (for his notebooks, Leonardo was copying the ordinarily written text from its reflection in a mirror) by his left-handedness. But one can rebut this with the fact that his left-handedness does not explain Leonardoís omission of all punctuation, and his amalgamating several words to form one, or his cutting one word into parts.
Also, the traditional Art historical method fails when we find in Leonardoís writings some places where he directly opposes the canon of the painting, traditional of his time. For example, Leon Batista Alberti, who formulated this canon in his treatise "On Painting" (1435- 6), rejects the ugliness and seeks the beautiful and "the mean"63, so that the parts of body, ugly to the eye, should be covered with draperies64. Contrary to this, Leonardo teaches to "mingle direct contraries so that they may afford a great contrast to one another, and all the more when they are in close proximity; that is, the ugly next to the beautiful, etc." For Leo-
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nardo, it is not a passion for the grotesquely ugly (as Schapiro is convinced), but the way to "vary [contraries] as much and as close together as possible."65
While Alberti writes about the mirror reflection of nature66; Leonardo speaks against any passive imitation of nature: "The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence"67, so that ìthe painter strives and competes with nature."68 Alberti writes on the canonic "agreeable and pleasant attractiveness" 69 and appropriate functionality in "Istoria", whereas Leonardo writes that being a good painter is to depict every- thing that exists and in any combination of opposite elements70. So that he can be interested in pleasurableness and symmetry, on one side, and extremity and marginality, on the other side, destroying all norms of conventional functionality. In his painting "Battle at Anghiari," Leonardo depicts already ìinhumanî and ìunnaturalî state of pazzia bestialissima, so that even horses fight each other with their teeth, just as he writes in some "screenplay" of the battle in his notebooks71. In the "screenplay" of the Deluge, he writes, "...others strangled themselves with their own hands, others seized their own children and violently slew them at a blow..."72
Alberti argues for the "single beauty" created by similarity of size, function, and kind73, and suggests to "weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving,"74 but Leonardo writes on the ambivalence, as if a "twin" character of every pair of opposites75, and that they tend to reunite in some whole of a "double beauty" "to escape ... imperfection."76 Alberti writes, "it would not be suitable to dress ... Mars or Jove in the clothes of a woman"77, but Leonardo is famous for his sexual ambiguous images, so that "separate [are] united."78 Leonardo has expressed not only extremes opposing each other. He has not
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only united opposite images in one painting, but he has combined the opposites in one and the same image. Not only the double-natured mutants on the pages of his notebooks, but all his creations have this double nature ñ they are ambivalent and polyphonic, they intermix the in- comparable kinds and incompatible functions, showing things from front and back simulta- neously. We might say that Leonardo created so few paintings precisely because he could never realize his screenplays fully under the conditions of the dominating artificial canon.
Leonardo's concept of double-images was directly connected with his scientific optic theory of "image within image," as if one unilateral mirror is placed in front of the other mirror to show the world from all sides: "The whole [is] in every smallest part of it; and all the objects in the whole, and all in each smallest part; each in all and all in every part"79. So that "Man is the image of the world"80, and every image includes the entire Universe, with all its different qualities and rivaling opposites. Every image in Leonardoís paintings realizes its lost or hidden unity of all its tragic and comic doublets. The lower ascends, and the higher descends in this grandiose Carnival of the Universe. Machiavelli also wrote on the deceitfulness of the mirror and on revelation by double or circular mirrors: "I see, not with your mirror, where nothing is seen but prudence, but with that of the many, which is obliged in political affairs..."81
In his "A Lady with An Ermine", a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Lodovico Sforza, Leonardo depicts the courtesan in the garment of Madonna with Child -- Divine, not earthly Ma Donna -- a red dress and a blue cloak. And she holds in her hands not the divine infant, but a beast. It is not the portrait of the courtesan, and it is not a parody of the Madonna. It is the courtesan mirrored in the Madonna, and the Madonna mirrored in the courtesan, because you cannot understand one without another. And this double-image unites
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the ultimate bottom and the ultimate height, provoking you to transcend the one-sidedness of any sublimated superiority and the one-sidedness of any illusively liberating debasement.
Leonardo wrote: "Disgrace should be represented upside down, because all her deeds are contrary to God and tend to hell."82 In "A Lady with An Ermine", it is her red dress and blue cloak of the Madonna that become a pivot for the turning of the image "upside down." Bakhtin compared double-images with the two inverted figures (suits) on playing cards:
"The specificity of the structure of the Carnival image is that it embraces and unites within it- self both poles of becoming and both members of antithesis: birth-death, youth-senility, top- bottom, face-buttocks, praise-abuse, assertion-negation, the tragic-the comic, etc., while the upper pole of the heterogeneous (or double) image is reflected in the lower one according to the principle of suits on playing cards. It could be said, that antagonists meet with each other, look into each other, are reflected in each other, know and understand each other."83
Here are the three levels of Leonardoís signification in his "A Lady with An Ermine":
1. Ermine signifies an animal devoid of any human significance (a "rigid designator");
2. (a) Ermine signifies purity and moderation in old bestiaries (a heraldic symbol);
(b) Heraldic Ermine signifies il Moro in the context of his social and personal life (a personal symbol);
3. Ermine is a beast given birth to by Cecilia Gallerani (Ermine-infant instead of Christ-infant) -- her illegitimate child from il Moro -- a bastard.
The first level gives us a commonplace signification, which does not mean much. The second one is a level of allegorizing where some of the important natural qualities of the Ermine are intentionally omitted, or repressed by other signifiers, alien to this animal and forcedly imported into the meaning of the Ermine. So that the true nature of the Ermine is disguised under artificial covers. Such symbolism is conventional and loses any significance in any other, different context (for example, in another epoch or in another country). The third level is disallegorizing. It shows the Ermine again as an animal, but in combination with all the previous contexts. All the conventional signifiers become the sides of one integral sphere of the universal understanding of the Ermine as a beast, a creature, in comparison and contrast
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with a man, a creator. Il Moro as the Ermine loses his disguise of alleged purity, which he wanted to establish by comparing himself with the Heraldic Ermine, and reveals himself as a true beast. The Ermine migrates through the contexts of existence, incapable of becoming their creator. Here the universal Ermine-signifier retains the social and personal applications of the conventional Ermine-signifier.
The first level of signification corresponds to the words, which Leonardo writes in an ordinary fashion, for example, geographic names. The second level corresponds to the inverts -- to all these enigmatic allegories, or rather allegorisms written in his notebooks by mirror-ill-writing. These allegories are intentionally over-allegorized (for example, Envy is represented by more than twenty allegorisms84. These allegorisms radically differ from Leonardoís paintings, which are very concise. Here, the principle of the allegory -- disguise -- is driven to the extreme manifestation. It seems that these allegorisms collect all the existent allegories on some particular theme. These different allegories represent objects under the cover of praise or abuse. Allegories-inverts are conventional and are each attached to its own specific, foxed context. When all the allegories are combined, the ambivalent double-meaning is born. It is the third and last level of signification. The Leonardesque smile is an indication, a hint and a warning that Leonardoís creations could not be understood in a direct mirror-like-understanding of the hierarchical uniformity. That is from the point of view of one kind, one size and one function85.
Thievish and Mischievous Ganymede
The Freudian stigma of homosexuality as a pathology, and Leonardoís homosexuality as an anomaly both collapse if we find the same attitudes and ways of life shared by many others, for example by Machiavelli who discussed in his letters the implications of his own son's (Lo-
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dovico's) intimacy with a younger boy86. The Freudian diagnosis of neurosis, built on the ex- clusive relationships of Leonardo with his pupils, especially on buying them gifts87, fails, when it is discovered that in the Renaissance Florence, it was a usual practice for an admirer to give his adolescent lover luxurious gifts88.
Michael Rocke says in his book "Forbidden Friendships. Homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence" (1996) that in this small city of only around 40,000 inhabitants, during the period of the special Officers of the Night, as many as 17,000 individuals or more were incriminated at least once in sodomy, with close to 3,000 convicted89. Over 13,000 individu- als were denounced or denounced themselves90. Rocke calls sodomy in the 15th century Florence "the competitive, sometimes violent pursuit of boys by men"91, and says that Vice contra naturam developed male sociability and confraternity, occupational solidarities to patron- client relations, neighborhood ties, and networks of friends92. Rocke defines specific features of the Renaissance pederasty in this way:
Sodomy was not limited to some social "minority"93. There existed a strict hierarchy of roles; adult males did not have sex together.94 Rigid hierarchy defined the roles as such ñ the ìactive roleî of an adult as an anal inserter or even fellator, and the "passive role" of an adolescent boy95. The roles were not exchangeable (no reciprocal homosexuality and mutual penetration)96. The passive role was feminine and dishonorable, but limited to the biological period of adolescence.97
Those who continued to be sodomized in older age, were liable to ridicule and harsh punishment. Masculinity was not compromised, because boys who were sodomized did not necessarily stay ho- mosexuals, or established their active virile stand by becoming sodomites themselves98. Also, the restriction of the "womanly" role to adolescents did not jeopardize the "manly" gender identity of the adult sodomites. Homosexuality could have turned into bisexuality, and vice versa.
There appeared a social group of "inveterate" or habitual sodomites, who never took a wife99. For these sodomites, erotic relations with boys represented a conscious and long-term alternative to marriage. Ten of the 18 unmarried men over the age of 40 in the catasto sample [tax records] were implicated in sodomy with more than one partner between 1478 and 1502100. In some cases, sodomites had a permanent boy -- "bardassa"101 (slave). Some times, Florentine homosexuals created long-term unions as if surrogate male families102.
One can add to Rockeís analysis, that Florentine sodomy was of the Carnival quality. It
cultivated virility through preliminary experience of femininity. It allowed for gender-ambiguity. And this ambiguity was ambivalent -- the males did not lose their virility in their
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homosexuality, but at the same time acquired a unique experience of being feminine. But, most of all, pederasty was a basis for creating the sublime images of angels, expressing what was called by Rocke "the beauty and erotic appeal of adolescence"103. Cherub has inevitably transmuted into Amor (or Cupid), and in the letters of Machiavelli, who was a womanizer, Love is a boy104.
In 1449, the government issued a threat of announcing the accused sodomites at the legislative councils, but if a person voluntarily turned himself in, confessed his sexual relations, and named his partners, he was guaranteed full immunity from prosecution105. The period 1470s and 1480s was the only period in which self-accusations were regularly noted in extant registers; an average of some forty people denounced themselves for sodomy every year106. One can conclude that having already the anonymous accusation of homosexuality in 1476, Leonardo was seeking to leave Florence in 1482 for Milan. He wrote:
"Nothing is so much to be feared as Evil Report. This Evil Report is born of life."107 "Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love."
"When I did well, as a boy you used to put me in prison. Now if I do it being grown up, you will do worse to me."108
In 1496, in Florence, Savonarola, the head of the Dominican convent, organized groups of teenage boys who patroled the streets and ridiculed sodomites in the true Carnival spirit of frightening tragicomedy. Savonarola was executed, but sodomy remained. In a letter of 1513, Machiavelli told his friend, Francesco Vettori, a real anecdotal story from the life of Florentine sodomites: how a sodomite, Giuliano Brancaccio, sodomized a boy and promised to pay him, but called himself by the name of his friend, Fillipo Casavecchia, and gave his address. When the boy tried to get his money, Fillipo was afraid to pay the boy. Finally, Fillipo in- ferred that it was Brancaccio who had done to him "that rascally deed." So, Fillipo summoned one of his friends, and taking the boy, they came to Brancaccio, and the boy recognized
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him by his voice. Machiavelli wrote: "And in Florence in this Carnival nothing else is said than ëAre you Brancaccio or are you Casa?í And the story was well known under the whole heaven"109. The question "Are you Bancaccio or are you Casa?" was funny because both Brancaccio and Casa (Fillipo Casavecchia) were sodomites, one, probably, younger than the other, and were lovers at some time. In another letter to Vettori, Machiavelli wrote: "Fillipo and Brancaccio have with you become one soul in two bodies, or rather two souls in one body, in order not to make a mistake."110
Salai, a Leonardoís pupil and a life-long beloved, came to the home of Leonardo in 1490, when he was ten. Rocke writes: "In the 1478-1502 survey there are 133 confessed relations that involved partners whose recorded ages ranges from ten to eighteen"111. According to Rocke, Leonardo should have been in the group of habitual or inveterate sodomites. But the evidence that Leonardo was an actual, not a latent homosexual is more deeply rooted in Leonardo's own principles of life and experience. Leonardo was averse to any form of inner la- tency. For him, knowledge is experience, and experience concerned all sides of life at once, reassembling them, refracting them until the macrocosm and the microcosm will unite in a pupil of an eye. He says: "Oh! What a difference there is between the imaging quality of such light in the dark inner eye and actually seeing it outside this darkness."112 And if Leonardo had been a misogynist, he would not have been able to depict a woman so perfectly as he did. If Leonardo had been indifferent, he would not have been able to paint his "Battle at Anghiari". If Leonardo had been asexual, his creations would not have been so seductively sexual. He wrote [On Truth], "dissimulation is of no avail ... Nothing is hidden under the sun ... the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth."113
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Latency is an unconscious self-deception, a mechanism of automatic forgetting and allegorizing. An ego-syntonic individual sees the world through the veil of Alberti (the veil of hypothetical positive science and artificial partial conventions). Freudians confuse the latency or lethargy of an egoist with the self-control and ambivalent reaction of a trickster. Leonardo was a person and an artist, who passionately repulsed any linear approach of others toward himself, because he suffered from canonic and schematic labels more than other men of his time: a social label of being a bastard, an artistic label of a craftsman at a beckon call of the patrons, an intellectual label of a philosopher not taken seriously because of not knowing Greek, etc. And his highest tricksterism consisted in the art of preserving his inner integrity, notwithstanding the aggressiveness of any decomposed and unilateral environment, with all its partialities and prejudices.
Leonardo wrote on a veil of the Trickster as a temporary state of conceiving and bearing the creation. So that a creator stays veiled not in order to separate himself from the world, but, on the contrary, in order to embrace more of its polyphony, and later to influence the world as if he, the artist, is a god. His veil is a measure of protecting his pregnancy. His repulsion of any linear approach is his Immaculate Conception from all sides of reality, fighting with each other114. In Freudian sublimation, the real, but latent, is substituted with the manifest, but illusive, while Leonardo would always return to reality ñ to real passion, real experi- ence, real image and real man.
As with artistic canon, Leonardo used the canon of the sexuality of his time that was more suited to his life of a bastard and a servant of dukes when everything collapsed around him. He refracted his epoch in his sexuality as well as in his paintings. He experienced it fully, so that he was capable of transcending the limits of the modes of sexuality, available to his epoch.
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His homosexuality, or Vice contra naturam, was his challenge to nature, and one of the realiza- tions of his own Immaculate Conception. Hermaphrodite impregnates himself. But if every- thing is in everything else, according to Leonardo, then self-sufficiency is the self-sufficiency of everything and everybody. For Leonardo, to love means to recover this connection. To love means to bring somebody, your lover, to a state or a stage of this recovery; and nothing is sin- ful in this recovery. True lovers unite in all sides of their life, physically and intellectually, and in all events of everyday life115.
Contrary to the Freudian charge of Narcissism, viz., that Leonardoís pupils were for him ìonly substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood -- boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child,"116 -- Leonardoís relations with Gian Giacomo deí Caprotti, whom he called Salai (Little Satan), and who was a "Thief, liar, obstinate, glutton,"117 were far from being ideal. But Leonardoís relationship with Salai reached a level other than the usual sodomy in Florence. Homosexuals created surrogate families, but in these "pseudo-families", boys were treated as subordinates118. More common homosexual relationships were similar to Ovidís description of Orpheusí life after he had finally lost Eurydice:
"Orpheus kept himself clear of women and love and its risks. Women, of course, loved him, expressed in one way or another their interest, but he refused them, preferring the random spasms of passion with adolescent boys in whom no one invests sentiment, knowing theyíd grow, change, and in any event forget him as promptly as he would forget each one of them..."119
Machiavelli described how similar Brancaccio and Casa had behaved themselves with their boys:
[About Casa] "I see him gesture and now shift himself toward one side, now toward the other; I see him sometimes shake his head at the halting and modest answers of the boy; I see him, as he speaks with him, taking now the function of the father, now of the teacher, now of the lover; and that poor boy remaining doubtful of the end to which he wants to bring him; and now he
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fears for his honor, now trusts in the gravity of the man, now has respect for his elegant and mature bearing."120
Machiavelli actually spoke to his friend, Vettori, how Vettori, Brancaccio and Casa had spent time together having dinner with some boy and girl. And Machiavelli described his own friend in these words: "I see you, Mr. Ambassador, Ö having an eye on both that boy, the right however, and the other on that girl..."121 In another letter he gave Mr. Ambassador some advice:
"These do not know that he who is held prudent by day will never be held crazy by night, and if anyone is thought a man of substance and effective, whatever he does to refresh his spirit and live happily will bring him honor and not blame; and instead of being called a bugger or a whoremaster, it will be said that he is tolerant, ready, and a good companion."122
One can say, that Leonardo had taken Salai because he was a boy who would not reject Vice contra naturam, and whose family would not oppose it. But Leonardo had a relationship with Salai for twenty-five years and left him half of his vine garden, where Salai had previously built his house123. He made Salai a painter and sent him as his representative to high officials124. Leonardo suffered and endured Salai, a "thief and liar", and finally brought him up, recovered him, and one can say, saved him from the violent pursuit of the sodomites who just used their boys. So Leonardo differed from his friend Machiavelli precisely in the depth and responsibility of his relationships.