the
physician by his bedside who had said: "Faciamus experimentum in anima
vili"): "Vilem animam appellas pro qua Christus non dedignatus est
mori."[56]

A greater Humanist than Muret, Erasmus himself, seems as a young man, when
in the Augustinian monastery of Stein, to have had a homosexual attraction
to another Brother (afterward Prior) to whom he addressed many
passionately affectionate letters; his affection seems, however, to have
been unrequited.[57]

As the Renaissance developed, homosexuality seems to become more prominent
among distinguished persons. Poliziano was accused of pederasty. Aretino
was a pederast, as Pope Julius II seems also to have been. Ariosto wrote
in his satires, no doubt too extremely:--

"Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti."[58]

Tasso had a homosexual strain in his nature, but he was of weak and
feminine constitution, sensitively emotional and physically frail.[59]

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,