Michelangelo’s contemporary, the painter Bazzi (1477-1549), seems also to have been radically inverted, and to this fact he owed his nickname Sodoma.  As, however, he was married and had children, it may be that he was, as we should now say, of bisexual temperament.  He was a great artist who has been dealt with unjustly, partly, perhaps, because of the prejudice of Vasari,—­whose admiration for Michelangelo amounted to worship, but who is contemptuous toward Sodoma and grudging of praise,—­partly because his work is little known out of Italy and not very easy of access there.  Reckless, unbalanced, and eccentric in his life, Sodoma revealed in his painting a peculiar feminine softness and warmth—­which indeed we seem to see also in his portrait of himself at Monte Oliveto Maggiore—­and a very marked and tender feeling for masculine, but scarcely virile, beauty.[64]

Cellini was probably homosexual.  He was imprisoned on a charge of unnatural vice and is himself suspiciously silent in his autobiography concerning this imprisonment.[65]

In the seventeenth century another notable sculptor who has been termed the Flemish Cellini, Jerome Duquesnoy (whose still more distinguished brother Francois executed the Manneken Pis in Brussels), was an invert; having finally been accused of sexual relations with a youth in a chapel of the Ghent Cathedral, where he was executing a monument for the bishop, he was strangled and burned, notwithstanding that much influence, including that of the bishop, was brought to bear in his behalf.[66]

In more recent times Winkelmann, who was the initiator of a new Greek Renaissance and of the modern appreciation of ancient art, lies under what seems to be a well-grounded suspicion of sexual inversion.  His letters to male friends are full of the most passionate expressions of love.  His violent death also appears to have been due to a love-adventure with a man.  The murderer was a cook, a wholly uncultivated man, a criminal who had already been condemned to death, and shortly before murdering Winkelmann for the sake of plunder he was found to be on very intimate terms with him.[67] It is noteworthy that sexual inversion should so often be found associated with the study of antiquity.  It must not, however, be too hastily concluded that this is due to suggestion and that to abolish the study of Greek literature and art would be largely to abolish sexual inversion.  What has really occurred in those recent cases that may be studied, and therefore without doubt in the older cases, is that the subject of congenital sexual inversion is attracted to the study of Greek antiquity because he finds there the explanation and the apotheosis of his own obscure impulses.  Undoubtedly that study tends to develop these impulses.

While it is peculiarly easy to name men of distinguished ability who, either certainly or in all probability, have been affected by homosexual tendencies, they are not isolated manifestations.  They spring out of an element of diffused homosexuality which is at least as marked in civilization as it is in savagery.  It is easy to find illustrations in every country.  Here it may suffice to refer to France, Germany, and England.