It is, however, among artists, at that time and later, that homosexuality may most notably be traced.  Leonardo da Vinci, whose ideals as revealed in his work are so strangely bisexual, lay under homosexual suspicion in his youth.  In 1476, when he was 24 years of age, charges were made against him before the Florentine officials for the control of public morality, and were repeated, though they do not appear to have been substantiated.  There is, however, some ground for supposing that Leonardo was imprisoned in his youth.[60] Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths and his pupils were more remarkable for their attractive appearance than for their skill; to one at least of them he was strongly attached, while there is no record of any attachment to a woman.  Freud, who has studied Leonardo with his usual subtlety, considers that his temperament was marked by “ideal homosexuality."[61]

Michelangelo, one of the very chief artists of the Renaissance period, we cannot now doubt, was sexually inverted.  The evidence furnished by his own letters and poems, as well as the researches of numerous recent workers,—­Parlagreco, Scheffler, J.A.  Symonds, etc.,—­may be said to have placed this beyond question.[62] He belonged to a family of 5 brothers, 4 of whom never married, and so far as is known left no offspring; the fifth only left 1 male heir.  His biographer describes Michelangelo as “a man of peculiar, not altogether healthy, nervous temperament.”  He was indifferent to women; only in one case, indeed, during his long life is there evidence even of friendship with a woman, while he was very sensitive to the beauty of men, and his friendships were very tender and enthusiastic.  At the same time there is no reason to suppose that he formed any physically passionate relationships with men, and even his enemies seldom or never made this accusation against him.  We may probably accept the estimate of his character given by Symonds:—­

Michelangelo Buonarotti was one of those exceptional, but not uncommon men who are born with sensibilities abnormally deflected from the ordinary channel.  He showed no partiality for women, and a notable enthusiasm for the beauty of young men....  He was a man of physically frigid temperament, extremely sensitive to beauty of the male type, who habitually philosophized his emotions, and contemplated the living objects of his admiration as amiable, not only for their personal qualities, but also for their esthetical attractiveness.[63]

A temperament of this kind seems to have had no significance for the men of those days; they were blind to all homosexual emotion which had no result in sodomy.  Plato found such attraction a subject for sentimental metaphysics, but it was not until nearly our own time that it again became a subject of interest and study.  Yet it undoubtedly had profound influence on Michelangelo’s art, impelling him to find every kind of human beauty in the male form, and only a grave dignity or tenderness, divorced from every quality that is sexually desirable, in the female form.  This deeply rooted abnormality is at once the key to the melancholy of Michelangelo and to the mystery of his art.