Leonardo is gay

But a new opera is shining fresh light on his private passions — by depicting his intense relationships with two of his assistants. But what do we know of the man, of his passions, of Leonardo in love? Leonardo left nothing that could be read directly as a diary or journal: his interest was in the outer, rather than the inner, world. Nevertheless, writers, from the 16th-Century biographer Giorgio Vasari to Sigmund Freud, have scoured the thousands of pages of written notes left by Leonardo for clues.

A new TV series about Leonardo da Vinci that portrays the Italian artist and thinker as a gay outsider has reopened a long-running debate about his sexuality. Each episode of the series, commissioned by a coalition of European broadcasters, will revolve around one of his masterworks, reports The Times. Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Leonardo is always described in all sources as extremely handsome and elegant. His character was also considered to be extremely sociable and entertaining. It is therefore surprising that he remained unmarried. That he was gay is only one possibility.

Since his death more than years ago, multihyphenate genius Leonardo da Vinci and his spectacular works have inspired respect and wonder in generation after generation the world over. Though his motivations for leaving Florence are unclear — some historians say he may have been at least partially prompted by a desire to escape the cloud of sodomy allegations lodged against him in Florence a few years earlier — he sent the ambitious duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, a meticulous list of the advanced engineering projects and war machinery he could help him construct. Almost as an afterthought, he mentioned at the end of his pitch to Sforza that he was also an artist. Unfortunately, the Sala delle Asse has been off- limits to visitors for most of the last decade while it undergoes painstaking restoration, but its completion is promised soon.