The secret world of Homosexuality in the Italian Renaissance

The text below is the excerpt of the book Homosexuality in Art (ISBN: 9781783107278), written by James Smalls, published by Parkstone International.

The word “Renaissance” means rebirth. It refers specifically to a rebirth of Greek and Roman art, literature, philosophy, and science and, more broadly, a thirst for secular and empirical knowledge. The Renaissance is a kind of reversal of medieval goals in that artists of that period focused on the natural rather than the supernatural world. The individual and his experience was considered more important than the cultivation of a purely spiritual life. This change was due to the impact and influence of Humanism on the late fourteenth-century in Europe.

Humanism began with the classically-trained writers Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, both of whom focused on human affairs and looked into the classical past for inspiration. In doing so, they took an interest in homosexuality given its prominence in pagan myth, chronicles, mores and art. The humanists insisted on reuniting classical forms and subjects with their original pederastic meanings. Not every humanist was a homosexual, but many did sympathize with a desire to express homoeroticism. These humanists often mingled with members of an increasingly visible intellectual and homosexual subculture. In the Renaissance, the private and public confessions of homoerotic desires by artists such as Michelangelo and Il Sodoma in major centers of artistic and homosexual activities such as Florence and Venice, speak to an “early modern” individual and group homosexual identity. Saslow notes that during the period, “some men seemed to have understood themselves to possess a distinct personality type – or at least they knew that others thought they did.”

The high point of Italy’s Renaissance began in the late 1490s and lasted until the 1530s. Classical humanism was everywhere and the hedonism associated with it, which included bisexuality, was tolerated. The central tension during the period was in attempting to reconcile a strong Catholicism with the knowledge and values found in paganism and science. Many humanists raided classical mythology to dignify their own homosexual preferences. It is important to note that as homosexuality increased in visibility, so too did its repression by state power through police surveillance.

From court records, we know that sodomy cut across all classes, from royalty to clerics to writers and artists. As had been the case during the Middle Ages, sodomy in the Renaissance referred not only to anal sex, but to all varieties of sexual practices that were considered against nature. This included masturbation, intercrural sex, bestiality, and the violent rape of boys. Anal sex remained, however, the primary concern. Although prominent in the public imagination of the Renaissance, sodomy remained a taboo punishable by burning alive – a fate associated with the biblical burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. The outbreak of the plague helped underscore sodomy’s connotation as a destructive act worthy of the wrath of God.

Cases of sodomy often occurred between an older and a younger man, with the former as active partner. In both Venice and Florence, the active partner in anal sex was deemed more culpable. The distinction between passive and active sodomy began to appear in the records of the mid-1440s. In Venice, it was the Signori di Notte in the fourteenth century, and the Council of Ten in the fifteenth century that tried and prosecuted all crimes. These were made up of important men from important Venetian families. It has been argued that during the Renaissance, sodomy came to be considered a horrific crime likened to treason and heresy.

Both Venice and Florence are similar in that there seems to have been an emergence of a homosexual subculture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As time passed, this subculture became more public and more widespread, and involved all classes of people ranging from peasants to nobles. A burgeoning homosexual subculture and its upper-class participation was perhaps “due to the growth of humanist studies” and a desire to emulate the thoughts and actions of the ancients.

An important distinction must be made between the social view of same-sex relationships in the Italian Renaissance and the literary and artistic expression of those relationships during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the end of the thirteenth century, sodomy was considered a crime and its practice was blamed for a series of natural plagues that ravaged Western Europe. In the fifteenth century, the state stepped up the policing of moral conduct in both Florence and Venice. In 1432, the Florentine authorities created the Office of the Night – a special commission charged with the prosecution of increased charges of sodomy.

Between 1424 and 1425, San Bernardino of Siena delivered four famous sermons in Florence in which he gave a horrifying description of the sodomite as a murderer whose “stench had reached heaven.” (Armando Maggi, “Italian Renaissance,” in Haggerty) He charged subversive fraternities with promoting sodomy along with political factionalism and sedition. As the number of cases of sodomy rose after 1400 in Florence and Venice, the church tried to control the damage by promoting more aggressive anti-sodomy rhetoric.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florence was one of the most dynamic cultural centers of Europe. It had gained a reputation as a city hospitable to homosexuality. The Florentine proclivity for sodomy became so familiar to Europeans in the sixteenth century that in Germany a popular term for “to sodomize” was florenzen, while a sodomite was dubbed a Florenzer. (Michael Rocke, “Florence,” in Haggerty) Florence was not alone in its almost paranoid response to an increased visibility of homosexuality. The seeming frequent practice of sodomy and other homosexual acts were also of concern to fourteenth and fifteenth century Renaissance Venice. Sodomy in Venice was referred to as “that most infamous deed,” “the most foul crime,” “the most famous sin.”

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